LUKE 19:27

Don’t Ask What God Can Do For You, Ask Who You Can Kill In His Name?

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Recently Abrahamism demonstrated its mighty hold on the minds of those who want to commit horror. A 23 year old French Muslim killed three French paratroopers, one of them from Martinique (someone whom  American (unconscious) racists would call “black“). The other two paratroopers were Muslims, as it turned out (one of them a Franco-Moroccan).

One of the unarmed Muslim paratroopers who was treacherously assassinated was called Mohammed, just like the killer. Then this criminal, Mohammed Mehra, killed three children, and a dad protecting his two sons, at a Jewish school. He benefitted from the help of other Muslim fanatics. Dozens got arrested. All indications are that Mohammed Mehra was just a little creep. He was arrested many times for various exactions unrelated to religion. There is a video of him, laughing to no end, beaming with an angel face, after making a rodeo with a BMW.

More children were wounded, but they survived the horrible wounds. It is useful to peer into the horror. Not by voyeurism, but to see how deep hatred can go.

One of the children, a seven year old girl, was hit in the shoulder by a .45 colt of the U.S. Army (!). The Muslim fanatic, filming the assassination with a camera strapped on his belly, chased her, grabbed her by her pony tail. Then he brought the gun to her head, and fired. But the gun jammed. Instead of listening to Allah’s hint, still holding onto her, he got another gun he had, released the safety, and killed her.

This sort of violence, I claim, is intrinsic to Abrahamism (“Judeo-Christo-Islamism”). It’s what it was made for, and by. It’s no coincidence that Islam created the greatest empire ever seen, in a few years: by the sword, for the sword.

The lunatics are getting agitated. In the extract below, published in the electronic version of a newspaper read by millions, a fanatic ponders about my case:

Mr. belal zakaria asks me in the Wall Street Journal, whether Satan is hiding behind me. Here is Mr. Zakaria’s quote, complete with savage grammar, Saturday, March 31, 2012:

• @patrice ayme
• Who is hiding behind you like satan (also a light in wavelength and angstrom) misleading using wordpress.com and Abraham with illicit comment of Mental illness of Abraham? The following abraham proof of prostration given 1400 yrs like moon splitting Surah Moon …
• In all muslim prayers, Muslim seek refuge from misleader 5/times per day world wide for reason Obvious.”

Is organized superstition a mental illness “for reason obvious”?

Abraham is the mythical founder of Judaism. He is famous for agreeing with a voice in his head telling him to kill his son. Hence Abraham is the founder of Christianism five centuries later, and Islamism, another six centuries after that.

Muhammad got advice about founding Islam from several Christian family members, including his cousin, a professional Christian monk, who told him he had obviously encountered the Archangel Gabriel in the desert. That’s how the whole Islam (“Submission“) thing got to roll…

Submission to whom? That is the question. Well, to the boss. Abraham was the ultimate sucker: to please his boss, he was ready to kill his son. The Abrahamists adulate him for that. Bosses, naturally, founded a religion around the idea.

Once a French catholic girl told me:”Christianism is the religion of love.” For her it was a fact, not a theory. She overlooked three things:

1) love has long existed, since there are brainy animals, and they breed. Thus, those who need Christianism to love may be mentally diseased.

2) Millions were killed in the name of Christianism. And not just by Christians roasting Muslim children for sustenance in the Middle East, or wadding, knee deep in blood in Jerusalem (both facts related by the best Christian eyewitnesses). No, millions were killed by Christians, in Europe, killing Christians who, they believe, did not believe correctly. By the way, I am (formally) a Christian, so, if I get killed by an Abrahamist, it will be more of the same: I did not believe correctly, according to my own co-religionists.

The civil war  in Syria is, first of all, a religious war between fanatics. Between Abrahamists. So far, 10,000 killed and counting. Assad’s dictatorship rests mostly on the (legitimate) fear for their lives some sectarians such as Christians and Alawites have of the (majority) Sunnis. When the Arabs invaded the area, it was entirely Christian. Then there were massacres, and oppression. Some of these massacres were between some particular Muslims (“Sunni”), and the partisans (“Shia”) of Ali (hence Alawites). This is what happened in the last 13 centuries.

3) In the Bible’s Old Testament, there are many calls to murder. And so it is, more discreetly in the New Testament. Here is Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, indeed, a prophet of Islam, ordering to kill non believers. [Actually, a more careful read shows Jesus was supposedly telling a bedtime story, from a “distant land“. Al Frommi called my attention to that apparently nullifying factor; however the murderous tendencies of Jesus are in plain, unambiguous display in other parts of the Gospels, see: “Christianity’s Jesus Is Evil“.]

Luke 19:27: “But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me.”

How loving is that?

When people say that Jesus is love, they, either, did not read the Bible, in which case they talk for sure about what they certainly don’t know, so they are liars. Or, then they think slaughtering those who do not believe the way they like is cool.

In the later case, Abrahamism, as most other mass superstitions, would be a mental disease induced to better exploit the naive in a systemic fashion by making them goose step behind the notion that their superiors even know how the universe works.

Organized superstition is organized stupidity. The way Abrahamism originally had it, it’s organized stupidity with evil intent.

Stupidity is a force against which the gods themselves contend in vain. It is also, in the case of Abrahamism, organized calls to murder. In the case of the Bible and the Qur’an, there are many clear appeals to murder (you can go the site below to read the quotes in the Qur’an:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/06/22/some-violence-in-holy-quran/

I never got around listing the same for Christianity, from lack of time.

Some have followed these calls to murder, for centuries, killing millions. There are also appeals to peace, true. But that’s irrelevant, once you are dead. The truth is, Christianism was imposed by emperor Constantine, viewed by a saint by the catholic Orthodox, and who viewed himself as the “13th apostle”. Among others, he killed his nephew, ordered his son executed (without bothering to give a reason), and boiled his wife (no reason either).

If Nero had founded a religion, the same ones would be probably worshipping that. (Nero assassinated his mother, but she was a well known plotter, had basically reigned as an Augusta, and poisoned her husband Claudius. So she was not that innocent. Constantine, by killing the righteous for no good reason, was more Satanic, on the face of it, thus better qualified to found the world upside down, as the Cathars noticed.)

Now, predictably, some of the fanatics roll out people who made a scientific career who were themselves fanatics. Salam, a physics Nobel, was an example (some said he did not deserve his Nobel, BTW). He called the Qur’an “the most beautiful book that ever was“. I guess, complete with the call for the destruction of the unbelievers.

One who is often rolled out: — John Polkinghorne, Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge.

That Christian fanatic famously wrote that:

“only in the media, and in the popular and polemical scientific writing, does there persist the myth of the light of pure scientific truth confronting the darkness of obscurantist religious error.
No progress will be made in the debate about religious belief unless participants are prepared to recognize that the issue of truth is as important to religion as it is to science.
People who tell you that ‘Science tells you everything you need to know about the world’ or ‘Science tells you that religion is all wrong’ or ‘Science tells you there is no God’, those people aren’t telling you scientific things. They are saying metaphysical things and they have to defend their positions from metaphysical reasons.”

Against stupidity and criminality, the gods themselves contend in vain.

Science is about what is true. Science cannot yet prove when people are lying. Science says nothing, globally, about superstition. At least, so far. We have no proof, yet, that those who really believe that god tell them to kill somebody are mad. The secular law does not treat them as criminals, early enough.

The only adverse relationship between superstition and science is that the same form of critical intelligence that built science, if applied to superstition, shows that it is wrong.

For example: twins have different fates. Exit astrology.

For example: that hearsay from some analphabetic epileptic in the desert, 14 centuries ago, with a chip on his shoulder from his analphabetism, and living from his wife’s business, is enough for a proof of a theory of the universe stretches the imagination of all, but the most stupid.

For example: people go on their knees, and evoke Jesus. But there is no record of his life (at a time when there were plenty of records, and at a time when there were the record of the execution of several Jesus like characters, in the same region).

Enormous histories like that of the Jewish general Josephus, written 7 years after Saint Paul’s writings, evoke plenty of pseudo-prophets, but not Jesus. On the usual strict criterions of objective history, Jesus never existed.

And in the first Christian writings, Saint Paul writes, black on white, that he “never met Jesus in person, except inside his own head”…It’s a hint if there ever was one..

Whereas mass superstition is organized stupidity, science is organized intelligence.

But, to practice science, one does not need to be particularly intelligent. And to be famous in science, one can just be lucky, or, like Einstein, present a lot of other people’s work as one’s own.
So professor Polkinghorne can say whatever he wants. There were very bright people goose stepping murderously behind Hitler. Including several Nobel Prize Laureates (Lenard), and super smart young mathematicians (Teichmuller an example). Locally intelligent, globally stupid. Certainly abject and criminal.

And what was Nazism? Why was Nazism so keen to kill Jews, and how come it succeeded so well? Well, just look at the history of Christianism, and at the belts of the SS: “Goot Mit Uns!” God With US! was written there. The first century of imperial Christianism was little more than a massacre of everything, and everybody non Christian.

Nine years after the last SS was killed in combat for his fanatical cause, the U.S. Congress adopted the motto of the SS. Amen.

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Patrice Ayme
—

Foolish Parrots, Exploding Gas.

Abstract: Stupidity may be irresistible, but if avoidable, it it is always immoral.

 Are middle class supporters of Obaromcare so naïve, that they betray their own class? Or are they just from the Middle Ages?

 Are CO2 deniers traitors to their fatherland? What is sure is that gas exploitation at the most extreme depth gives an opportunity to the French oil giant Total, after a few quakes, to explode the North Sea. Playing with Pluto, the god of the underground, can be enlightening.

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FEUDALCARE?

 The Supreme Court Of the U.S. (SCOTUS) asked quite a few question about the ill fated Obaromcare, the Trojan Horse of the health care plutocracy, the pseudo-naïve attempt, by Obama, to implement the Heritage Foundation’s  prescription for the rich to take care of the poor (that was previously installed by Romney, in the state that he governed).

 Basically we have president Obama in the Supreme Court desperately defending Romney’s health care system. Pseudo leftists do not seem to have noticed the irony. Why not vote for Romney directly? Is not Obama himself, saying that Romney knows best?

 The Supreme Court forgot to ask the main question: why do you want to bring back feudalism? Or maybe SCOTUS was careful to forget asking the obvious. The right wingers want money for their lords, so they could not ask. The left wingers want their direct suzerain, Obama of Hawai’i, and other “liberal” lords to be pleased with them, so they did not ask either. They all want feudalism to come back.

 When private people are forced into contract with private entities, that’s called Feudalism. Indeed.

 Why did the French revolution happen? Why was the inventor of chemistry, the gentleman who discovered and named oxygen decapitated? Because he was a Fermier General. Fermiers Generaux were private individuals in charge of taxation. They brought in taxes, paid themselves (handsomely) in passing, and gave the proceeds to the government. They became very wealthy. (Lavoisier used his wealth to found his expensive lab, a sort of private CERN of the 18th century.)

 In the case of Obaromcare, a health tax is raised, and then given directly to private individuals or organizations. So it’s not really a tax, and they don’t call it a tax. It’s not a tax, because taxes are public things. It’s more like a tribute. It goes from the people to the Fermiers Generaux, and stay there.

 In Europe, there are health care taxes. In France those health care taxes go directly to Assurance Maladie, the French Medicare For All, they don’t go to some of the richest people in the world. Taxes are fine: they come from the public, they go to the public.

 But Obaromcare taxes go directly to those American plutocrats Obaromcare was organized around.

 True, the Heritage Foundation wants the time of hyper wealthy lords to come back. Is that good enough a reason, oh people of the pseudo left?  

 Another point: some of the naive have said that, should the individual stop being forced to purchase private (health) insurance, the premiums would skyrocket. The health plutocrats, anxious to enjoy Obaromcare, ASAP, have threatened the populus with that notion, and caused great alarm to their parrots on the, pseudo-left.

 Do the right honorable totally naive people really believe that anything else, except a colossal rise of premiums would happen? Could they show me where in Obaromcare this is excluded?

 Visualize the naivety: if all pay the hyper rich, all will have health insurance, they say, and they contently bleat. Why? Do they really think those who don’t have insurance now can afford it, but prefer to do without it?

 Obama, the objective ally of the health care plutocracy was careful to NOT set-up a public health insurance system to compete with the private health care lords. If he had set-up a tax to force everybody to pay for Medicare, that would have been constitutional: a tax, from the public, to the public. Not a tribute, from the serfs, to their lords.

 Last, and not least: why are so many so called self declared “liberals” goose stepping behind the ultra right wing plutocratic Heritage Foundation?  Do they have only a spinal cord? Or is that a spinal choir?

 Obaromcare would have been constitutional in the Middle Ages. Now we have republics. Paying taxes to the wealthiest is unlawful, in a republic.

 One wishes Obama could have learned some correct history at Punahou. However, I learned from one of his classmates and closest friends that this prestigious private school (tuition more than eighteen thousand dollars), covered all of European history, from the Ancient Greeks to World War Two, in just a year. Obviously no time to explain the socio-economic organization of the European Middle Ages, when the hyper rich took care of the health of the poor.

 This may explain why Obama appears not to know that he re-invented feudalism.

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 CO2 TERRORISM?

 OK, feudalism we know, nothing new, last time it lasted eight centuries or so. Just a question of time. If it pleases Americans or Saudis to prostrate themselves to great lords, so be it.

 However, the collapse of the biosphere that threatens everybody, is another matter entirely.

 There is grotesque propaganda by the oil plutocrats in the USA that stuffing the atmosphere and ocean exponentially with all sorts of greenhouse poisons does not matter. Most Americans are not inclined to disagree with their masters, so they approve with the drunken enthusiasm of those inclined to please the mighty.

 (Notice the analogy with the blind approval of the simple for Obaromcare, just decried. To please the master, the poodle barks enthusiastically. His force is their force, or so they feel, thus they bark.)

 A question the self described “climate skeptics” have is: how do you know for sure? All right, we are never sure of anything, so it’s a trick question. We all use faith, and that’s the truth. However the faith we use is more or less well founded.

 I am going to fly to Rome, I have faith that the plane is well taken care of, that the pilots are not crazy, and know whatever situation they may encounter.

 The naivety of CO2 deniers knows no bounds. Deliberate naivety is bad faith.

 And the proof of their bad faith? CO2 deniers have been told there was no proof that going from 280 ppm CO2 to 460 ppm of CO2 equivalent gases was certainly a problem. Just don’t eat fish: it’s full of mercury from coal burning. Right. We have the highest rate of CO2 equivalent in more than 30 million years, all of a sudden, and what? We worry?

 The truth about the threat of climate change? Various components of the American defense establishment have “climate change” departments, and have already warned “climate change” is a major security threat to the USA. CIA, Pentagon, name it, they talk not just about climate change, but about the coming wars it will bring. “Climate change” is obviously the greatest security threat.

 So I would dare to propose that CO2 deniers are actually traitors to the fatherland, not just dim witted parrots trained by their greedy plutocratic masters.

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 WE EXPLODE, YOU BURN:

 Will Total explode (part of) the North Sea? Ten years ago, Total basked in its technological superiority. It succeeded to exploit a very deep and very hot reservoir of “natural gas”, that is methane, CH4, the famous greenhouse gas that burns spontaneously in swamps. The reservoir was below 5,300 meters (3.5 miles) of very complicated rock, at the bottom of the ocean.

 The gas was mixed with acidic CO2, Hydrogen Sulfide, H2S, and light petroleum. The temperature was hundreds of degrees Celsius, the pressure an unbelievable 1,100 bars (one thousand one hundred times atmospheric pressure). Trouble surfaced in recent years: as the gas was extracted, the field imploded slowly, under the enormous pressure of surrounding rock. Quakes struck on the margins of the field. Finally Total, a month ago, started to lose control of an adjoining, disused well.

 So now methane is escaping. The 200 workers abandoned the giant platform, worth 8 billion Euros (more than 10 billion dollars). Sea and air exclusion zones were put in place. So far a strong wind is blowing the heavy methane away. Did I say there was still a flame on top, far above the gas?

 Some people in Aberdeen, Scotland, more than 200 kilometers away, are worried of a fuel air explosion… At the limit, under condition ideal to Pluto, with no wind for a few days, one could imagine a nuclear bomb strength explosion…

 This comes after the Chevron leak off Brazil. There is plenty of fossil fuel. But it’s going to cost too much. First, in environmental damage. Go smell the gas.

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Patrice Ayme

Deflating BIG BANG’s Inflation.

A BIG NOISE DOES NOT BIG SCIENCE MAKE.

Abstract: The Big Bang cosmological model is possibly completely false. It depends alarmingly upon the speed of expansion of the universe, assuming that, for reason and mechanism unknown, it was, at some point, for some convenient duration, trillions of trillions of times the speed of light. Or maybe not.

I give also a few other reasons to throw cold water on the Big Bang.

Geometrically the Big Bang assumes that it is “turtles all the way down”. Yet, Quantum Physics, properly interpreted, gives us reasons to think otherwise. Especially after integrating the latest experimental results on the apparent singularization of Quantum waves (2011). (If that gets confirmed, singularization is the greatest discovery in Quantum Physics since 1924: Louis De Broglie would be right, and Niels Bohr, wrong. I have always believed in singularization.)

It is unfortunate that this activity, Big Bang physics, has been all too much celebrated as the greatest success of the human spirit, and scientific rigor. I will try to show below that it is closer to mythology than to proper science. Although my reasons below are deep and cogent, it is clear that even the masses have some intuitive doubts about scientists who seem all too sure about the grandest scheme of things. Having Hawking telling us about “A Short History of Time“, when nobody knows what time is, is not conducive to respect.

No wonder that, with such a model as the Big Bang brandished all the time as science much to admire, and presumably to emulate, all too many people feel that with science, anything goes. And thus, as often found in the USA, in a further identification, that anything goes is science. So to each its own. And next thing you know, fundamentalists pop up in every backyard.

On the positive side, Big Bang madness gives an opportunity to illustrate the fact that the topology of the space of all theories is not connected (if a single one of a few hypotheses Big Bangists make casually, is false, the Big Bang theory will completely implode into the nothingness it claims the universe arises from!)

[The essay is technical in parts; readers are invited to imitate Big Bang physicists, and jump over any part they don’t understand, to get a feeling for the overall message, which is that Big Bang physics is not science according to the most exacting standards of science… Paradoxically enough for an area with such pretense!]

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A physicist relates in “Turtles all The Way Down?” that he got an interesting email about the Big Bang. Basically the writer said it was obvious mythology, and the physicist insisted it was not so: “The writer said she didn’t see how you could make something out of nothing. She collects creation myths and thought that, no matter how you sliced it, it’s always “turtles all the way down.” This is a reference to creation myths where the world is poised on top of a turtle, which is itself poised on top of something else, but raises the issue: Is there any firm ground?

This is worth addressing because it illustrates the gulf between the understandings in people’s minds about the Big Bang on one hand, and how physicists deal with it on the other. To be clear – we have a wealth of observations that support the Big Bang, but you have to be careful. We can only look back into the universe to a moment 300,000 years after the ‘start,’ as best we can discern it. At this early moment, the universe went from being opaque to transparent… The remnant photons from this time are seen as the so-called cosmic microwave radiation “

The later pontificating affirmation depends upon the common wisdom interpretation of the 3 degree Kelvin Cosmic Microwave Radiation as photons from the Big Bang explosion. Well, that’s mostly an hypothesis. For example, if photons, just as neutrinos (long thought to be massless), turn out to have a non zero rest mass, that hypothesis will be out of the window.

Those cosmic microwave photons are supposed to be cosmically distended, and thus weakened, by the expansion of their wave packets from the cosmic expansion of space, the later itself depending upon the Big Bang model. This is just a supposition, albeit a crucial one. In other words, the Big Bang model is eerily reminiscent of a house of cards of mutually supporting assertions: turtles all the way down in a mutually supporting circle.

I will argue that it looks all too much as a vicious circle to be used as a way to illustrate what science is. Science is about establishing iron clad proofs, not wishful thinking with proofs depending upon what they want to demonstrate (which is all what the interpretation of cosmic photons as big bangers is).

Reconciling models with data sounds reasonable. That is what is done in most of science. However it is not scientific, if the models have nothing to do with reality to start with. If the model is angels on a pinhead, no amount of tweaking of the model, will get it right.

This is related to a much more general problem, that of the distance between systems of thought (which is all what “models” are). If models are too far from each other, they cannot morphed into each other.

When Darwinian style models were unable to explain ultra fast adaptative evolution, epigenetics had to be invented.

The greatest discovery in cosmology since the discovery of the expansion has been the fact that it proceeded at an accelerating pace. That was not predicted by the main stream cosmology.

It was pointed out by De Sitter (1917), Friedman (1924) and Lemaître (1927) that the Einstein gravity equation described an expanding universe (none of these scientists were American).

The work of a number of astronomers, culminating with Hubble, confirmed the expansion later: the visible universe was dynamic. As an homage to American hegemony, Lemaître’s law came to be known as Hubble Law. Never mind that Hubble himself as late as 1936, did not believe in the Big Bang finding weird the “anomaly of a curiously small and dense and… suspiciously young universe”. Besides the injustice, it introduces a flaw in the logical flow of discovery.

When it became obviously confirmed that distant galaxies were receding, and the further, the faster, Einstein proclaimed his “greatest blunder”, that of having introduced a “Cosmological Constant”, precisely to imply a static universe.

The Einstein gravity field equation was built to reflect Riemann’s 1854 idea on the nature of force. That came out of his  Habilitationsschrift entitled Über die Hypothesen welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen (“On the hypotheses which underlie geometry“), a remarkable essay that contained just one equation (if that). Riemann observed that acceleration could be described by geodesics behavior, whether they came together, or separated. Thus force could be so described.

Basically, applied to gravity, that meant the gravity equation ought to be: curvature of spacetime = mass-energy of spacetime.

However Quantum Physics was discovered meanwhile. It says that energy travels in packets (Planck 1900-Einstein 1905). Yet, those packets are computed by waves (De Broglie 1923).

In other words, it was not turtles all the way down. At some point, the turtles turn into waves.

Einstein’s gravity equations did not incorporate matter, in a detailed way, that is, Quantum Physics. When some Quantum Field Theory ideas were introduced a bit (Zeldovich, before 1973, “Hawking radiation“, 1974), it turned out that, after all, Black Holes evaporated (contrarily to what Michell (1784) and Laplace (1796), discoverers of the idea of Black Holes would have expected to be ever possible in the slightest way).

But much more needs to be done: except when wave packets have collapsed, matter is all waves. The exact nature of these waves is unknown. Recent Quantum experiments, using “weak measurements” apparently exhibit waves-with-singularities, the picture De Broglie himself had proposed to go further than the Copenhagen Interpretation of de Broglie’s work.

Should something like the Big Bang make sense, the exact mathematical nature of the matter waves, and how to accommodate those singularities would have to become paramount. (As the purported  confirmation of the singularities was published on June 2, 2011 in Science magazine, the depth of these considerations will take some time to reach the society of cosmologists… After all it took more than 40 years to realize that the time-energy uncertainty implied Black Hole evaporation, which should have been immediately obvious!)

Back to our cosmological theory timeline. Time passed. Gamow made fun of the notion of everything coming out of a point, calling it the “Big Bang“. However, the Cosmological Cosmic Background was found at 3 Kelvin, a remnant, it was suggested of said explosion.

That ruled out the Steady State Cosmology, it seemed.

Yet, when regions distant by more than light can travel, they were found to be the same, as if the universe had always been there.

So some physicists postulated that the universe had expanded faster than light by an enormous factor. That was called inflation, caused by a non observed “inflaton field“.

Indecipherable reasonings were rolled out to claim that the mass-energy uncertainty inequality could be made to fabricate matter and energy, as needed. Indecipherable: indeed, a point of infinite density does not make sense in Quantum Physics (which basically insists that there are no points). And never mind that the new Big Bang, cosmological inflation looked exactly like Hoyle’s Steady State theory, after all (as Hoyle himself pointed out to a frosty reception in 1994).

The Big Bang reasonings are full of major assumptions whose proofs are justified by the end, namely the Big Bang, truly a beginning (as found in the Bible?).

For example, how do we know that cosmological photons do not, in some sense, simply age, producing thus the 3 Kelvin background? How do we know that, if the universe can expand so incredibly fast at some point, it could not expand incredibly slow, at some other point? Or even shrink for a while, in a recession, before resuming inflation?

For that matter we do not know why, at this point, the universe is expanding ever faster. Or is it just here?

And what is the evidence that a universe can be created out of nothing? Stanford’ s professor Linde, one of the originator of the inflation cosmology, has been writing articles where he creates universes all over, all the time. There is zero evidence for that.

(There was a whole school of Soviet physicists who, for philosophical reasons, were highly critical of “General Relativity”, starting, correctly with its absurd name; they followed Vladimir Fock 1955 book… which I own. Zeldovich and Linde were among them, they basically discovered much of what was attributed later to Western physicists, to emphasize the glory of plutocratically connected universities!)

Big bang specialists will snarl that I did not mentioned that GUTs (Grand Unified Theories)fit the Big Bang like a glove, so my objection that the Quantum is not integrated in the Big Bang is uninformed.

However, we talk of different things, at different scales. The Big Bang ultimately makes assertions, unsupported assertions, I added, about what is called the Trans-Planckian scale, where Quantum Field Theory breaks down. Conventional Big Bang theory uses basically Riemann’s mathematics from 1854 CE that ignores the waves-with-singularities that the universe is probably made of. That’s fine as a classroom project, it’s not fine as an example of what science can do, or, a fortiori, of what science is.

Big Bang cosmology is not science in the usual meaning of the term. It’s not molecular biology, geology, or material science. Nor mathematics. It’s all too much a bunch of assumptions piled up on top of each other, covered up by ironclad naïve certainty, a contagious illness probably contacted from the Standard Model of particle physics.

Real science demonstrates why Sea Lions and Seals, although they look the same, at first sight, are actually very different, since they evolved from very different ancestors. That illustrates well convergent evolution, when the same mathematics in the environment lead to the same solutions.

Real science demonstrates how stars evolve, going through many stages according to their masses and the nature of the various successive thermonuclear reactions in their core.

Real science explains why life is carbon based, thanks to the wealth of complexities carbon chemistry lends itself to.

Real science explains what happens to cause a tsunami (confirming what Greek philosophers suspected it was, 25 centuries ago).

Big Bang cosmology uses all too finely tuned reasonings unsupported by firm logic or experimental certainty, all over its theoretical landscape. Possibly, it’s completely false. It is unfortunate that this possible complete falsehood is depicted by physicists eager for cheap fame or book sales as the ultimate in science. In its present state, it is the best creation mythology we have, or an amusing project, but little more than that.

Inflated science is poetry, or metaphor. It is not science. Real science is truth. Real science is what’s left when everything else has been exposed as lies. In the case of the Big Bang, among other things, all other possibilities besides the common interpretation of Cosmic Microwave Background, have not been examined in detail, and thus

Real science is what allows planes to fly, not a bunch of lies and exaggerations held together by the thin veneer of self glorification. Scientific poetry, such as the Big Bang, is closer to science fiction, or mythology.

John Huth concludes his essay reasonably with: “We [Big bang cosmologists]fully realize that our models will extrapolate to conditions that raise difficult issues, like infinite densities. More often than not, the difficult conditions are something we avoid talking about, because, largely, we cannot really test or measure these. If it is inaccessible, it is inaccessible. The work can be perhaps more likened to the work of explorers. Our job is to map new territories, and, if anything, we can only report on territories we’ve explored. What lies beyond the horizon is a matter of speculation.
Responses? Questions? Contact me on Twitter @John Huth”

One would wish cosmologists would be that reasonable, all the time, for all to read and hear. How well one has explored, that is the question. For the longest time, explorers reported the strangest things and monsters they had absolutely seen (an exasperated Aristotle dispatched students to go out and faithfully report on all the biology they could rigorously observe). To claim one has seen light from a big boom may be true, but it is not scientifically demonstrated. Yet.

(And that photons do not age seems unlikely to me for reasons I have mentioned in older essays of mine. I am happy to report that Feynman, no less, approved of my considerations when I evoked them.)

One interest of science is to teach how the faith we have in models can be reconciled with evidence. That the distance between models can be insurmountable is an important lesson in the history of thought. No amount of tweaking could bring the geocentric theory close to the correct one, the heliocentric theory. One had to shatter the faith, to realize that yes, quite possibly, planets were turning around the sun: that is what Buridan and his students concluded around 1300 CE, after rolling over Aristotle’s erroneous physics, and introducing the concept of inertia. However, of course, they added perfidiously, ‘scripture‘ said the sun turned around the Earth, so we may as well believe that, since we cannot tell at this point, for sure.

If the distance between models with scientific pretense can be insurmountable, so can it be, for the distances between mentalities (and, in particular, civilizations). That is the core justification of the crackdown secularism had to implement upon murderous superstitions. (The obvious example being the outlawing of the Celtic or Carthagenese religions, to put it intemporally, not wanting to allude to anything having to do with the sects of Abraham… At least today.)

It’s not turtles all the way down, or turtles everywhere. Genuinely different thought systems and mentalities exist. And the way to explore that is by excluding all other possibilities, the way real science does, and the way that, precisely cosmology of the origins does, and cannot do.

Some will cynically argue that, to get funding to launch satellites and other big science projects, one needs pretty stories to charm the infantile minds of politicians. But I will not go down that slippery slope.

The main interest of science is to teach to the obscure masses how to learn to distinguish  truth from fiction. Everything else, however useful, is secondary. To pass a charming fiction such as the Big Bang for a certainty is just the sort of masquerade of the scientific method that genuine scientist will want to eschew.

***

Patrice Ayme

Energy Question For The USA

THE AGE OF OIL PRODUCED THE AMERICAN CENTURY. NOW WHAT?

No Vision, No Mission, No Energy

***

Another editorial of Paul Krugman firing volleys at republican “paranoia” for accusing Obama of driving up oil prices. As he observes in “Paranoia Strikes Deeper“: …“the president of the United States doesn’t control gasoline prices, or even have much influence over those prices. Oil prices are set in a world market, and America, which accounts for only about a tenth of world production, can’t move those prices much. Indeed, the recent rise in gas prices has taken place despite rising U.S. oil production and falling imports.”

American households tend to borrow as much as they can. Thus, when oil prices increase markedly, Americans have to cut in crucial budgets, such as house payments. I said at the time that it would lead to a peak in housing prices, and it did.

Why such a drastic influence of oil prices on the economy of the USA? Because Americans, except in a few places such as New York, commute by private car to work. So Americans have to feed the car, if they want to feed themselves.

It was not this way a century ago, or so. At the time public transportation systems using electric tramways and trains were found all over, even in Los Angeles. Car companies put an end to that outrage in the late fifties by buying, and then destroying, all the public transportation system they could put their greedy hands on.  Fossil fuel plutocrats were delighted.

But let’s set aside Krugman’s fake indignation. He is smart enough to know that Romney will do what Romney needs to do to win the Obama, I mean, the election. Waxing lyrical about Romney doing as Obama, does not beat going lyrical about sunrise.

Gasoline prices in the USA are way down in real dollars to what they used to be, decades ago. And so is the gas tax. This means that, far from adapting to the gathering multiply pronged world ecological and energy crisis, the USA has gone the other way, denying there is any crisis. “What? Me worry?” That’s got to be anti-American indeed.

Now real blooded Americans are all into strip searches and the death panel at the White House.

In Europe, gas prices are more than twice that of the USA, thanks to heavy taxes (stations in France have sported two euros a liter, that is 8 euros per gallon, or more than $10.50).

This means that far from being down and out, Europe is efficient enough to operate at that high price level. It also means that Europe is much more motivated than the USA to get much more efficient. In other words, high gasoline prices in Europe are a safety margin. The high prices force the European free market to adapt to a situation that the free market of the USA will encounter someday. Adaptation takes decades: new energies take in the average, historically speaking 50 years to become dominant. Same, one would guess, for energy efficiencies.

Basically, if oil prices doubled from here, gasoline prices would double in the USA. Whereas, even if the Europeans decided to keep the same high taxes, gasoline prices would only augment by 50%. And, in the much more efficient European economy, with plenty of public electric transportation available, the noxious effects on the European economy would be much less than one would expect from a 50% oil price rise. 

The world gets 55 × 1018 joules of useful energy from 475 × 1018 joules of primary energy produced by fossil fuels, biomass and nuclear power plants. That tremendous inefficiency (less than 13%!)  needs to be corrected. It will be, if, and only if, prices are kept high. Thus energy taxes are necessary to adapt to the looming penury.

Why looming penury? Because the reserves of other fossil fuels may have been vastly overestimated (by a factor of 5 in the case of coal). Various fossil fuel lobbies have interest to over-estimate the reserves (because it keeps the world addicted, as they present their industry as a long range solution, which it is not).

Looking at the raw production numbers, as exhibited below in the graphs paints a completely different story: production from existing fields is going down dramatically (at 5% rate, per year).

In other words we are in the treachorous waters between the catastrophe of CO2 poisoning and the disaster of running out of energy to burn.

The unavoidable rise of fuel prices will be less grave in Europe than in the USA, because many Europeans would opt for the available electric based public transportation system (the combination of much more efficient electric motors and central generation is much more efficient than distributing oil to put in SUVs all over, as done in the USA; SUVs, because there are too many holes in the asphalt. A problem partly related to high oil prices!).

Yet, the increase of the cost of imported oil corresponds exactly to the Italian deficit ($55 billion). Although that deficit increase had many causes, oil price increase was by far the most important. And the same for other Southern European countries. So the rise of oil prices was the barrel that broke the back of European debt.

In the USA, ten out of 11 post WWII recessions followed oil price spikes. Why are American minds so closed up to the looming strangulation of their economy by oil? Because the fossil fuel plutocracy is on a rampage in the USA. It uses a red hot propaganda to persuade the vast American public of undifferentiated sheep that there is no CO2 ecological crisis, and no energy crisis. (Although the latest polls indicate that two thirds of the public, in a splendid turn-around, believe that there is indeed a man-made climate change crisis; never mind that the New York Times had the latest tornado rampage, with 40 dead, presented as discreetly as possible.)

Why are the fossil plutocrats hysterical? Well we are past Peak Cheap Oil. Moreover, the “majors“, the world’s largest oil companies, have been pushed out of more and more countries, and replaced by national oil companies. Desperate, the majors have gone for riskier and riskier drilling in the deep ocean. Now Chevron, and Transocean, after a 4 day leak off Brazil, see prosecutors asking for lengthy prison sentences and enormous fines.  

Most of these oil companies are American, so they have pushed for fracking (destroying the underground with poisons to extract fossil fuels). Superficially, it works: USA imports of fossil fuels went quickly from 60% down to 40%.

However, that did not make a dent in the world price situation, because the demand keeps rising, but the world, overall, is PAST PEAK OIL (as I have long argued and the Nature article alluded to below confirmed, using the obvious argument found in the graphs).

So, basically, American fracking finances Chinese oil consumption. Here are some graphs extracted from Nature and the USA government:

 

 

[From James Murray and David King in Nature, 26 Jan 2012, vol 481, p. 435.]

 

When the horrid sun of diminishing resources rises over the parched American oil desert, while fracking reveals itself to be an unfathomable catastrophe, the howling is going to be very great, and one more reason for a depression will blossom.

Much of the USA’s superiority, in the last 150 years, has come from abundant and cheap oil. First in the North-East, then down to Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, California. Compare with Western Europe, which had basically no oil.

Oil was not just a question of cheap, convenient energy. Oil has, short of nuclear energy, the highest energy density of any material (OK, nuclear energy is millions of time more energy dense).

Oil gave the USA enormous diplomatic and conspiratorial leverage. American oil plutocrats helped Lenin and Stalin develop their colossal fields in the Caucasus and Caspian. One of those plutocrats, Harriman, son of a railroad magnate, and brother of another Harriman, was one of the main operators of the democratic party. Let alone banker to Hitler. He was decorated both by Stalin, and by Hitler. He then went on as U.S. ambassador to major European capitals, and stayed one the main operators of the government of the USA for decades. “Democrats” have long been impure.

Interestingly, I searched the Internet for a document mentioning Harriman’s Stalino-Hitlerian decorations, but could not find it (I have seen the pictures in the past). All I could read is how much Harriman resisted Stalin each time they met, and that was all the time (a total lie that Harriman resisted Hitler, or Stalin: Harriman was an accomplice of Stalin, and helped give him half of Europe, in exchange for manganese and other stuff. But now Internet agents are obviously paid to reconstruct a truth where American plutocrats look good,  knights in shining armor, fighting Stalin or Hitler, each time they met for tea, dinner, lunch, breakfast, and interminable conferences, for years on end, decade after decade).

A famous example of the clout oil provided the USA with: Texaco fueled Hitler’s conquest of the Spanish republic (this one is hard to hide, because the U.S. Congress slapped Texaco with a symbolic fine, well after the deed was done). That used to amuse Hitler a lot (Hitler gave elaborated reasons to his worried supporters for being in bed with American plutocrats; as the Nazi Party was officially socialist, and anti-plutocratic, that awkward situation may have led him to declare war to the USA on December 11, 1941, to ward off the German generals’ argument that he was just a little corporal in above his head).

Another example: Mussolini was hanged from an American gas station in Milan. Italian communists hanged him from his sponsors’ works.

The fueling of the fascists by American fossil fuel companies helped bring the American Century to the world in general, and Europe in particular. Without Stalin and American plutocratic oil, Hitler’s Panzers could not have moved in 1939 or 1940.

The dignified Elie Wiesel, instead of crying crocodiles tears, wondering how such a thing as Auschwitz was possible, should ask how and why the Nazi extermination machine was fuelled by American plutocrats, and how come he, himself, never talks about that.

Wiesel got the Nobel Peace Prize, just as Jimmy Carter (who launched the American attack on Afghanistan). Was it for disinformation? (And how come waging war in Afghanistan is a big plus for the Peace Prize? Is it related to the same mood which made Sweden help Hitler before and during WWII, and never having a serious look at that, ever since? I know the prize is ostensibly given by Norwegians.)

Wikipedia is big on the notion of “weasel words“, and rightly so. Deeper than that is what I would call weasel logic. And ever deeper, weasel worlds. To talk about Hitler without ever wondering who his sponsors were, and what they were after, is to live in a weasel world.

I like Elie Wiesel personally. Yet, just as I like Krugman, Obama, and countless others, such as the infamous Jean-Paul Sartre, he likes power even more than truth. OK, It is unfair to put Sartre, who really espoused the most abject terrorism, with the others… As long as individuals prefer power to truth, the spontaneous generation of infamy is insured.

Total oil sales, per day are about 100 million barrels (in truth the cap is lower, see graph above), at, say $100, so ten billion dollars a day, 3.6 trillion a year. The USA uses about 25% of that. Some have incorporated the price of the part of the gigantic American war machine and (what are truly) bribes to feudal warlords insuring Western access to the oil fields, and found a much higher cost up to $11 a gallon.

Ultimately, and pretty soon, in 2016, specialists expect oil prices to explode up, from the exhaustion of the existing oil fields. Then what?

Moreover, in 2016, the dependence upon OPEC, or, more exactly Arab regimes, is going to become much greater than now. What’s the plan of the USA? Extend ever more the security state, and go occupy the Middle East with a one million men army? To occupy, or not to occupy, that is the question.

Is it time for a better plan? And yes, any better plan will require consumers to pay higher energy prices. As consumers apparently want the army to procure the oil, they ought to pay for it.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Note 1: Flying cost at least ten times more in CO2 creation than taking a train. And jet fuel is not taxed, at least until the carbon plan of the European Union starts charging next year, in 2013. In spite of the screaming from the USA and its proxies: it’s funny how attached to subsidies American society can be.

Note 2: Refusing to pay for necessary military expenses through taxation and mobilization, was a big factor in the downfall of the Roman Principate.

The Principate then tried to accomplish defense on the cheap, by using more and more mercenaries. Many of these mercenaries or their children and descendants were poorly integrated in Roman republican culture (say emperors Diocletian or Constantine, let alone Stilicho the Vandal, a century later), so they established the Dominate, itself a negation of the Roman republic. Amusingly the Western Franks, those salt water (“Salian“) Franks remembered the Roman republic better than all these imports from the savage East… who could not remember it, they, and their ancestors, having never known it.

Guess what? The USA’s army presently employs 300,000 “private contractors” (aka, mercenaries). Curiously, in that case, it’s not so much to save money, than to extract more money from the system (but that’s another story). Still, it will have the same effect.

Money Does Not Care

And Those Who Follow It Don’t Either

PHILOSOPHY SAYS OBAROMCARE WILL NEVER WORK

***

Paul Krugman wrote an editorial Hurray For Health Care, in the New York Times lauding the effort of Obama on health:

“Now, the “Affordable Health Care Act” — known to its foes as Obamacare, and to the cognoscenti as ObamaRomneycare — isn’t easy to love, since it’s very much a compromise, dictated by the perceived political need to change existing coverage and challenge entrenched interests as little as possible. But the perfect is the enemy of the good; for all its imperfections, this reform would do an enormous amount of good. And one indicator of just how good it is comes from the apparent inability of its opponents to make an honest case against it. “

Yes, maybe, but another interpretation is possible, and it’s much more sinister. Indeed the “entrenched interest” is a code word for the extractive, exploitative right wing. Krugman just said the “Affordable Health Care Act” was about challenging the “entrenched interests”, that is, the health care lobby, as little as possible. So the opponents cannot make a honest case against it because, deep inside, they are delighted by it. As simple as that.

Krugman situates the problem:

“The fact is that individual health insurance, as currently constituted, just doesn’t work. If insurers are left free to deny coverage at will — as they are in, say, California — they offer cheap policies to the young and healthy (and try to yank coverage if you get sick) but refuse to cover anyone likely to need expensive care. Yet simply requiring that insurers cover people with pre-existing conditions, as in New York, doesn’t work either: premiums are sky-high because only the sick buy insurance.

The solution — originally proposed, believe it or not, by analysts at the ultra-right-wing Heritage Foundation — is a three-legged stool of regulation and subsidies. As in New York, insurers are required to cover everyone; in return, everyone is required to buy insurance, so that healthy as well as sick people are in the risk pool. Finally, subsidies make those mandated insurance purchases affordable for lower-income families.”

Well that should  look good on paper, for the naive idiots who, apparently, Krugman believes his readers are.

“Affordability” indeed depends upon the health care plutocracy seeing the light and showing some restraint. Because nothing forbids it to keep on squeezing those who can pay, until everybody is poor and needs subsidies, themselves obtained through taxes or borrowing from the rich against interest. In other words, nothing prevents the runaway plutocratic train to keep on rolling ever faster. This is the likeliest economic development, which, believe it or not, neither Krugman, nor the president or his advisers seem to have prepared for.

But I must admit that the “analysts” at the “Heritage Foundation” are plenty smart enough to have foreseen what will happen. Namely their plutocratic sponsors will get richer, and thus the rewards will come their way some more.

Can philosophy help? Sure. The philosophical method is about big thinking, not getting bogged down in the details and debris, as ants are wont to do, per their nature. Notice that Obama uses the adjective “affordable“. Health care is like a hotel, as far as Obama and company are concerned. And the question is: “Is it affordable?”

I will use the following neologism, which, I hope audaciously, will be forgiven: Obaromcare.

Obaromcare was suggested by the “ultra right wing Heritage Foundation” because it is perfect for that branch of plutocracy that feeds off health care. Any vampire feeds off fresh blood, and Obaromcare brings 50 million new victims to suck dry… The subsidy thing changes nothing as it simply means more resources will be siphoned off the middle class, through taxes.

That the “Heritage Foundation” brought the idea should have been a hint to the clueless. Maybe the president and the honorable Paul Krugman should refresh their critical abilities by reading Homer, and learn to beware of the Greeks and the gifts they bear. That was the lesson of the Trojan Horse. Greek boys used to learn that kind of things, 28 centuries ago. Now big boys are going around, steering the world, and they take the world’s most expensive plane, Air Force One, to go watch a baseball game, in Ohio. If that’s not a collapse of the idea of civilization, what is?

Obaromcare will not be the first time in the history of civilization when the public is forced to serve the private, while claiming it’s a public service to do so. It’s actually very much an heritage of the oldest plutocratic tradition.

Philosophically speaking, Obaromcare is close to the definition of the most abject plutocracy. It’s a desperate attempt to give a veneer of respectability to the plutocratic notion that profit primes care. All other developed countries know that, care, per se, is a fundamental notion living in another dimension than profit. This is the essential point.

Will Obaromcare work? First one has to settle what “working” means. The present system works splendidly for the for profit health care industry. What Obaromcare will do, for sure, is to make the present system bigger, not change its nature.

So, for the average people and the larger economy, Obaromcare will probably not work, because profit is at the center of it all, and nothing will stand in its way anymore than it does today. Obaromcare may have already increased national health spending.

In other developed countries, the will to care is what masters the search for profit. In any case, the numbers are talking louder than propaganda: the cost of health care in the USA is ascending at a completely unsustainable pace.

Obama could have made a reform that would have worked, if he had put the private plans in competition with MEDICARE FOR ALL: opening the existing Medicare, by far the largest health plan in the USA, and public, for people more than 65. The idea was to allow anyone to pay for Medicare. Just by economy of scale, Medicare would have been cheaper, while making a profit… for the public (by opposition of making a profit by whom Krugman himself calls “entrenched interests”, the plutocrats).

But Obama did not boost the existing public plan, Medicare. Medicare has efficiencies of size (it’s by far the largest health plan in the USA), but it is handicapped by not having the full negotiating capabilities of negotiating for lower costs that its peers in other countries have. One would have expected a democratic president to give full negotiating capability to Medicare. But that did not happen.

As usual, all Obama did, with health care, as he did with the banks, or with the military-industrial complex, or with the energy or transportation policies, was to follow the money, and bleat.

It would seem that neither Obama, nor Krugman, their kind, or entourage, understand that the economy is more than a one dimensional object. It is true that the search for profit is one of the dimension of the economy. But it is not the only one. Caring is another, and it is what health care is all about.

Chancellor Bismarck understood this perfectly well in the 1860s, when he created a national health care system for Prussia. That universal health coverage was extended after 1871 to the entire “Second Reich“. That system was so good that, after Loraine and Alsace got reintegrated inside France in 1918, they kept the Bismarck system (and have it to some extent, to this day).

The conflation of the notion of economy and the obsession with profit, shows up in the Obama’s administration naïve approach to whatever, including in its approach to space exploration: it believes, with some extreme right wing politicians, that the search for profits will render space easily accessible. According to this plutophiles, the economy responds only to profit, so augment the opportunity for profit, augment activity.

So the Obama administration has been heaping vast amounts of taxpayer money and property towards Elon Musk, a non American born immigrant based in the Silicon Valley, who, stupidly, believes that his primitive technology (already used by the Nazis 70 years ago) will open up space to his conniving mind.

That general drift is reminiscent of Solyndra, a solar company founded by friends (and financiers) of Obama in the Silicon Valley. The White House sank 550 million dollars of taxpayer money in Solyndra, although that was clearly none of its business. But it was the business of Silicon valley financiers Obama goees visit with his big plane every few weeks. Then the president goes from mansion to mansion, and is introduced to hordes of plutocrats and their broods, who have paid of the order of the median family income in the USA to do so. A four year old can give $40,000 to Obama, but then Obama gives 500 millions to her daddy’s “investment”. Hey, it’s all the same money, freshly laundered taxpayer money.  

The space technology ignorant Musk got in just one contract 1.6 billion from NASA. And many other supports, such as untold secret transfer of technology, that is, of public American property, to a white South African. Some famous astronauts (ex-senator and first american in space Glenn, Cernan, etc.) are furious about it.

On the side, the Obama administration supports Musk, with taxpayer money, for making electric cars for the rich. Musk has got to have good musk: Obama never misses a photo opportunity with him. Musk: smells good. General situation: smells bad.

Basically the same scheme is repeated for Obaromcare health care, as with Solyndra, or Musk, on a much grander scale. Public money for the privates, unlimited. In a few years people like Krugman will say:  We could have never guessed. We just did exactly what the “ultra conservative Heritage Foundation” told us to do. What could go wrong?

None of the 36  countries which have better health care systems than the USA have followed the money to build their health care system. For the very good reason given above: money does not care.  

Once care has been made the master motivation of its own house, health care, care can dictate lots of behaviors which enhance care and that the search for profit cannot dictate.

For example most forms of advertizing by private health care companies is unlawful in Europe (and European authorities are suggesting to crack down on more subtle forms of lobbying). In the USA, lobbying and advertizing has become more costly than research and development, explaining, at least partly, why the development of new drugs and cures has stagnated in recent years.

Here is the classification of health care systems from the World Health Organization:

1         France

2         Italy

3         San Marino

4         Andorra

5         Malta

6         Singapore

7         Spain

8         Oman

9         Austria

10        Japan

11        Norway

12        Portugal

13        Monaco

14        Greece

15        Iceland

16        Luxembourg

17        Netherlands

18        United  Kingdom

19        Ireland

20        Switzerland

21        Belgium

22        Colombia

23        Sweden

24        Cyprus

25        Germany

26        Saudi Arabia

27        United  Arab  Emirates

28        Israel

29        Morocco

30        Canada

31        Finland

32        Australia

33        Chile

34        Denmark

35        Dominica

36        Costa Rica

37        United States of America

So we saw that the motivational space of an economy has at least two neurological dimensions: profit, and care.

Are there others? Sure. Any motivation of human beings will be a factor in house-management (“eco-nomy”). Sex, of course is one, and so are many obsessions. And Will to Power and plain old Curiosity are also important. And so is also the Will to Vice (for a demonstration of that, have a close look at Afghanistan). In particular, pathological lying.

Obama and Krugman pretend to think that Wall Street is a hospital. Is that a medical condition, or something even worse?

***

Patrice Ayme

P/S: (I immediately sent a comment to Kruman’s sycophantic utterances, but the censorship system at the New York Times put me at the end of the line, and a barrage of sycophants at the front. It seems they censored me completely, not to give the idea the great liberals who lead us just follow the money. Of course, the NYT is a private outfit. but, when it reveals itself less honest than Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, it’s not a good sign that so many people on the left proclaim it be respectable! Maybe they should meditate some that many followers of Hitler were from the left, and that Hitler’s “ultra conservative” re-foundation was designed to appeal to them, and PC them into it.)

Euro Inner Devaluation

A SOLUTION FOR THE GREEKS

How did the situation get so bad in the Eurozone periphery? There are three explanatory layers below the usual one. I will concentrate on the case of Greece, just to focus minds.

Usually the trouble with Greece is described as follows: Greece is a barely functioning state, without even a registry of who owns what, full of liars and plutocrats who pay no taxes and overspend into silence the People with corruption generalized, thanks to the full complicity of vicious bankers knowing very well that they are too big to jail, as they hypnotized all important Western politicians into abject submission.

There is a lot of truth in the preceding, but the truth is not always and only where everybody believes it is. There are explanatory layers, much deeper than the preceding ones. And they are not restricted to Greece, or even Europe. Nor to recent times.

Those deeper explanatory layers I will expose are never explored, because making them explicit would endanger the vast conspiracy the self declared financial “Masters of the Universe” have engaged in. Not only would it expose their manipulations, but how to remedy them, and spoil any further enjoyment of this vain art.

I will presently address the most superficial of these causal layers, and leave the other two for some other times (although I have mentioned them many times before). Even that most superficial of layers is something the best American economists are careful not to talk about (or maybe they are just plain ignorant?).

Economists friendly to plutocratic supremacy have failed to mention that explanatory layer: I do not wonder why, as they are plutocratically financed themselves. They are decent people, they do not want to even think about biting the hands that feed them.

Greece has no interest, does not want, cannot, and will not, leave the euro. 

That, let it be said in passing, is the number one notion for decent economists to integrate. Leaving the Eurozone would only make the situation worse, for everybody, except for those who cling dearly to American supremacy, and those who prefer dictators to lead European regimes. Indeed, if Greece leaves, why not everybody else? (I explained before that the banking problem is logically independent of the currency used.)

As Dominique Strauss-Kahn just said at Cambridge University, accepting the destruction of the Eurozone would be accepting that Europe become a “province” of the USA. (I am heavily rephrasing what he said, but his meaning was clear.)

And if that is a “province” as the original “provincia” (now “Provence“) was, that means annexation. (By the way, thank to Geo, a contributor to this site, for pointing out to me the March 2012 DSK speech. I was totally unaware of it; it’s well worth listening to.)

What was wrong with the annexation of Provincia?

Well, Provincia was a Greek state, a mini empire led by Massilia, extending from beyond Barcelona to the west to beyond Nice (the Greek Νίκαια) to the east. That empire was as old as Rome, and an ally. Massalia had been founded as a colony of the most enterprising Greek nation, Phocaea, itself much older than Rome (or Athens, for that matter), and a member of the Ionian League (now under the Meccan crescent moon’s boot).

Now Phocaea, 20 centuries later, is under the Muslim boot, and it’s all Rome’s fault. Think whatever you want about the  “mildly Islamist” ruling party in Turkey, it has more than 100 journalists in jail, for various degres of treason, or criminal inciting to deep thought.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was going to be France’s much needed next president, is in very good position to know the difference of civilization between Europe and the USA (the prosecutor in New York, Vance his name, is financed by Wall Street, which hates Strauss-Kahn, just as the plutocrats in Rome hated the richest of them all, Caesar, because Caesar was the head of the “Populares“).

Rome, by breaking ancient Greek democracy-through-city-states, and unions thereof, paved the way not just to its own gigantically tyrannical self, and its grotesque mindless theocracy, but also to the giant, instantaneous Islamist tyranny of the seventh century. All this to explain not just why the relationship between Massalia and Phrygia is not as close as it used to be, but also why there was a lot of stagnation in between.   

When Rome conquered the Greeks, it killed intellectual innovation.

The Romans, whatever their charms, were no intellectuals. Nearly all Roman intellectuals of the Greco-Roman empire were actually Greeks, just as later nearly all Arabic speaking intellectuals were actually either Christian or Jewish (or  from families recently superficially converted to the master race’s religion).

The European Union is an attempt to reconstruct a world somewhat similar to the best union of independent democracies of the very ancient world, say when the the Ionian League reigned, next to Lydia and Phrygia, or even earlier, when the non sexist Cretan thalassocracy ruled the seas, in good intelligence with mildly authoritarian Egypt…

This model of an union of democracies, is the only one for this world. The historical model of the USA, crushing all the savages with the ever extending frontier pushed by crazed out plutocrats, is simply not viable. It only worked against American First Nations, because those were, really, savages.

(Why the extermination model had worked so well against the much more advanced Aztecs and Incas has to do with an immune problem, which was less important three centuries later; smallpox got to the Incas before Pizarro, and killed the Inca, starting a civil war, among other things; there is plenty of evidence that Spain massacred the American civilizations much by accident, and it was stopped at the top; the queen made enslavement of the Indians unlawful. Later Charles V ordered the arrest of the conquista, for cause of holocaust. In total contrast, the extermination of the North American Indians by the USA was deliberate, and the inability of the USA to revisit that monstrosity stays a threat… to the whole planet.)

Leaving the Eurozone would make the situation horrible for Greece: it would have to pay for all its energy and imports in an enormously devalued currency… And the People of Greece would lose the financial help from hundreds of millions of European taxpayers, and ultra cheap money directly from the European Central Bank (thanks to the amazing offices of the good Mr. Dragghi, an Italian banker, ex-partner at Goldman Sachs!).

In the 1940s, after engaging in successful war against Mussolini’s Italy, Greece was overrun by Hitler’s Nazis. Fortunately the Nazis suffered heavy losses, which piled up on top of the enormous losses they, and especially their officer corps, had already suffered over England, the enormously lethal Battle of France (May-June 1940, 200,000 soldiers killed), and in Norway (against the Norwegians first, and later against victorious Franco-British forces).

Even earlier the Nazis’ professional assassins had enjoyed unexpected losses in Poland. Bombing of Berlin by the French did not help German morale. It should have been fairly clear, even to the dimmest of Germans, that WWII would not be a repeat of WWI. This time the fascist snake would be struck at the head. But just as the Romans had no notion of intellectuality, nor did the Germans in 1940.

Thus when Hitler, delayed 6 weeks by a very costly invasion of Crete, finally attacked the USSR, his forces of professional assassins were much weakened. Many a good Nazi engineer had died in suicide charges against French fortifications, and most elite Nazi paratroops had been annihilated in Crete (they would be used again only against the French resistance in Vercors, in Spring 1944, it took that long to replenish them).

Hence we may say that democracy owes much to the courage of the Greeks against fascism, not just 25 centuries ago, in many formidable battles against the invading Persian juggernaut . But also during World War Two.

Nevertheless, for all their efforts, the Greeks were rewarded by a civil war in the 1940s between Greek communists, and foreign invaders, Anglo-Saxon plutocrats, aided by local agents. I am not exaggerating: the “Greek” civil war started with a British general giving an ultimatum in Greek to the… Greeks in Greece.

So now, here we are. Economists with access to all the centers of power, breathing together with Wall Street plutocrats, are giving advice to conservative European politicians and circles about what to do with Greece. It reminds me of 1946, with Anglo-Saxon military and special services telling the Greeks what would be happening in Greece, for the greater good of plutocracy (don’t scoff: ever since Greek ship magnates paid no taxes, and have been able to procure the likes of Jackie Kennedy as escort girls, a tradition pursued to this day).

Yet, there is an obvious mild solution to the mess developing in Europe: give to Greece and the like, the same medicine that Germany profited from.

In his editorial in the New York Times: “What Greece Means“, the honorable Paul Krugman pontificates erroneously that: “… countries like Greece and Ireland… had and have no good alternatives short of leaving the euro, an extreme step that, realistically, their leaders cannot take until all other options have failed — a state of affairs that, if you ask me, Greece is rapidly approaching.”

Well, that’s simply not true. I will demonstrate that not only there is an alternative, but that this alternative, a powerful weapon, was wielded by Merkel for her own selfish interest. Unjustifiably so.

In all fairness, Krugman’s main aim in the editorial was to show that austerity was bad, and that the situation in Greece proved the point. I agree, to a great extent. However I believe that targeted austerity, and targeted growth is where it’s at: grow schools for everybody, the market conditions for futuristic industries, and a sustainable energy procurement system; don’t grow plutocrats, socially irresponsible banks or the Islamist (“republic of“) Afghanistan. It’s all about precision bombing.  

“Why did Greece default? Americans economists, such as the pre-cited Paul Krugman, love to accuse the euro. They may as well accuse the evil eye. The euro, per se, has nothing to do with it. The all too weak powers of the ECB, much more (that is why one should be thankfull to Mr. Dragghi for violating the ECB charter; he (basically) gave more than a TRILLION to European banks englued in the crisis they created… in three months!)

All too many American “liberal” economists hate the euro, because, with all due respect, they are protecting their turf, New York City. All the caviar. Living in mansions. Looking intellectual. Without Wall Street, New York City would be just a larger Philadelphia. Made huge by all this Wall Street money, the giant 35,000 officers strong NYC police force can incarcerate all Wall Street occupiers, any time it is ordered to.

Americans have been enjoying the status of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, so the opinion of any American economist is suspect (as Keynes, not a shrinking, anti-capitalist violet, was the first to point out in 1944; Keynes wanted a world currency, not the dollar as world currency. Don’t expect Krugman to tell you that).

Without Wall Street, the Greek conservatives who got the country in the Eurozone, could not have cheated with the help of Goldman Sachs. Was Greece a Trojan Horse conceived by the Gold Man sacking civilization?

In any case, the fruits of empire are bound to make American economists lazy, more worried about pushing for Quantitative Easing to help those who buy them caviar, than for liquid thorium nuclear reactors, to save the biosphere.

What we have done, instead of putting engineering in the lead, is allowing plutocrats to think the world. The lowest and basest have been put in charge of the grandest and most noble, penetrating vision. Saurians are steering the bus. Now we are sinking in the tar sands of lost imagination, turning away from all possibilities but for surviving as living fossils, burning whatever we can dig in the ground, like forsaken Homo Erectus.

There are three causal layers to explain the European disaster deeper than what conventional economists tend to analyze, and let’s finally roll out, after these preliminaries, the obvious one.

It points, surprisingly, at Germany. The good Frau Doktor Merkel in particular, is an obvious culprit. Merkel poses as austere, a steady hand, but she forgets to advertize loudly that she was an engineer in Greece’s demise. That’s too bad, because therein a solution.

After coming to power, Merkel effected an INTERNAL DEVALUATION. That gave an unwise advantage to Germany…that it did not need.

Merkel jacked up the German Added Value tax from 16% to 19%. This acted like a protectionist measure inside Europe. The Added Valued Tax is charged on imports, not exports, so it behaves as an import tax.

Meanwhile she lowered considerably the taxes German companies had to pay when employing someone (by a third, I computed).

OK, maybe Merkel was right: the world’s greatest exporter is the European Union. You will not hear that from those who sing on roof tops about Europe’s decline. Maybe 45% of that is directly from German exports (after a back of the envelope computation, inside my head). However, considering the impact that her internal devaluation was bound to have on the rest of the Union, Merkel should have had the courtesy of informing the others, loudly, on the probable impact of her policy.

Maybe she did, sotto voce. This is an argument why European ministers should sit on each other’s councils of ministers (as DSK tried to impose, long ago). Some will say they have more important things to do. Yes, like what? 

The rest of Europe did not engage in such an internal devaluation trick in a timely manner.

Now Sarkozy, the plutophile French president, desperate for re-election, is proposing to do the same (mysteriously he calls that the “TVA sociale“). He proposes that, 6 years after Germany effected it. Too bad he did not notice before. He was probably too busy making love with the richest of the rich, and tasting the most refined caviar together (as there is an embargo on the best Caspian sea caviar, caviar is now made in France, illustrating where Sarkozy France’s priorities are. France used to have ideas, now she has caviar…)

All the states from the European periphery should do the same: give back to Germany some of its own medicine, some of this internal devaluation Merkel loves so much.

That counter-measure is already applied, and not just in Greece (where the AVT is now 23%!).

It goes without saying that Germany should help repair the damage it caused, by doing the opposite, internally revalue (lowering the German AVT, and rising other taxes could be done next week: Merkel is obviously over-eating while Rome burns).

The state of Greece has been in default since 2010, when it stopped paying private contractors which had worked for it. The default is official in March 2012, at least the credit rating agencies say so. Greece has stopped interest payments on old bonds enjoyed by the banks.

Technically more than 80% of the banks exchanged the loans for new ones which lost more than half of their value. A few banks chose instead to activate Credit Default Swaps.

If all banks had activated the CDS, we would have been in a repeat of 2008, as those CDS are backed up by drastically insufficient capital. In 2008 the major states of the West basically ordered the taxpayers to make the CDS payments. Taxpayers had to pay for something they had never heard of, financial derivatives. This time the banks paid. Progress.

Of course the crisis is not finished. The big problem is that, worldwide, greed has created imbalances. Worldwide bankers and financiers sit with politicians and they together breathe (in Latin: con spirare).

Plutocrats don’t even hide for their breathing together: see Davos.

And this is why coal plants are everywhere ever more spewing deadly gases, from CO2 to mercury vapor. It is also why China has caught up, and sometimes passed, the West in science and technology. Hence the trade imbalance problem. Now the West (EU, USA, Japan) whines at the WTO that China was unfair with rare earths. Why don’t they extract their own, as the West used to? (By the way, energy crammed thorium is often produced as a waste, doing so.) Too much money for caviar, and bankers’ private jets, not enough for productive work? And now whining that Chinese slaves are greedy?

Thorium nuclear reactors, or rather the absence thereof, make a very good illustration of the unfolding disaster. This technology was made to work 50 years ago, but was never developed. Thorium would allow us to escape the catastrophic CO2 crisis poisoning the biosphere, besides providing the solar system with cheap abundant energy and fast transportation for hundreds of thousands of years, all the way to Ganymede, Enceladus and Triton.

Why do I mention those three? Those moons of the Solar System have gigantic quantities of (very frozen) water, and are thus much more suitable for human exploration and colonization, than, say, Mars, had we very fast transportation, something a thorium engine could provide cheaply.

It is a big universe out there, and it is a very small enchanted paradise of a planet here. When one sees that European politicians took 6 years to realize that the leading country had grabbed for itself an advantage that should be theirs, bringing forth an easily avoidable disaster, one can only smirk.

Meanwhile the Obama administration, having apparently run out both of money and imagination, cancelled Mars missions that were supposed to find out what happened to life there. You see letting plutocrats go tax free, and banks getting nearly all the money in the world, has consequences. Obama wants a billion dollars for the re-election of his beautiful brown self, because he claims his color has civilizing properties. But he does not have a billion dollar for Mars.

What will people remember in the future? That the first American president of half African descent was so obsessed by skin color, that he gave up on the solar system. One billion dollar for him, none for Mars. In other words, intellectual terra nulla. Rome’s first African born and raised emperor, Septimus Severus, founder a dynasty, is not remembered for his racial origin. He is remembered for the warning he gave about the Senate based Roman plutocracy.

Never mind that the Mars missions were collaborations with ESA (European Space Agency). Ever since 1939, when the USA allied itself with Hitler, what Europeans think, or, actually thinking itself, has not been number one priority in Washington. Do Europeans want to become a province of that? Does the world have interest to become a province of that? 

Yes, the behavior of the USA at Munich, in 1938, or with the Hitlerian Air Force in 1939 (allowing it to fly, by providing crucial industrial products) is something American civilization avoids to talk even more carefully than the extermination of American First Nations. However, facts talk louder than silence.

A frustrated American soldier killed many civilians, including nine less than nine year old children last week, four of them less than 6 year old girls. By cancelling the Mars missions, Obama saved what the Pentagon spends in ten hours capturing and killing obnoxious Americans and Afghan children terrorists, out there. Especially all those little girls. Priorities, priorities…

***

Patrice Ayme

CIVILIZATION IS COMPARISON

CIVILIZATION IS ABOUT SUPERIORITY, INTRINSICALLY.

Civilization: Best. Alternative: Frequent. Devolution, Followed By Extermination. To Avoid That: Nurturing Superior Thoughts.

***

Abstract: The Politically Correct say: Everything is relative, thus to be respected equally. Their nose twitch, their eyelids go spastic, as they mumble their nihilistic absurdity. To recover their composure, they head to the closest Chinese goods store, to look at the newest toys.

Why is China so domineering? Because today’s China is vastly superior to yesterday’s China. China is fostering civilization, while others in the West, just indulge in the drug of consumption, a variant of exploitation.

This essay is mostly a flurry of (partly) analyzed further examples around the concept of civilization, some of them Politically Incorrect, I am happy to admit.

Civilization has a reverse, devolution (in the originally biological sense of degeneration). Yet, devolution is frequent in history, so it is an obvious menace.

The most famous devolution was the Greco-Roman one, and some day sophisticated computer models wil reproduce it. In my approach, that devolution originated with deep philosophical factors, which found their culmination in the civilization-incompatible fascist Christian stupidity of the Late Empire (the historian Gibbon followed emperor Julian in denouncing Christianism as the cause of the Greco-Roman degeneracy; unfortunately, that philosopher-emperor was savagely killed during an ill conceived war in Iraq). 

Greco-Roman devolution was propelled by plutocracy, tax avoidance, theocracy, and their accompanying anti-intellectualism and superstitious obscurantism. 

All this, I claim, was made possible by a fundamental anti-intellectualism. In other words, Christianism was an accident waiting to happen. Anti-intellectualism made the reign of fascism and plutocracy unavoidable, and Christianism was the fruit of its disgusting entrails. Amen.

All this degeneracy has many elements in common with what is going on presently with a lot of the West, led by the plutocracy of the USA. As the reign of money in elections, and SanctorumSantorum in the hearts of the haggard demonstrate.

Just look at Afghanistan since president Carter attacked in 1979. The problem is not so much that murderous war, but the headless buffoonery covering-up the reality of what happened. Many in the West really believe that 9/11 was an aggression out of the blue by the savages, and know nothing about the west having created the savages to start with. The real problem is the loss of touch with reality; that is, fundamentally why the Greco-Roman empire went down. That, in turn, was orchestrated by the plutocratic class which had hijacked Rome (to some extent a conspiracy of happenstance, see below).

The Greco-Roman imperial devolution led to a collapse of the global economy. (The city of Rome, long the world largest urbs, went from  population above a million to… just one, said a witness!)

Civilization, traditions, deconstruction, and devolution all relate with each other, sometimes constructively, sometimes destructively. Just as a biological cell is continuously deconstructing and reconstructing, if it is alive, same for civilization.

The healthy disrespect one should have for the errors of the past, and obsolete rituals is one of the engines of civilization: taking pleasure in criticizing what should not have be. Otherwise traditions, thus, the past, dominate. However the past is generally dead, because inasmuch as men may try to cling to it, ecology is always dynamic, be it only because of the pressure human techno-economy puts on it.

***

COLLAPSE OF GRECO-ROMANS: ALL ABOUT ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM:

Basically everything that could have gone wrong went wrong, and more, when Rome went down. A world nearly as complex as the one we have now, crashed. Dozens of reasons to explain the collapse of the empire have been suggested, from lead to Huns.

My interpretation is that the fundamental flaw was that the mental system used by the Romans was too homely to the plutocratic principle. Roman society was too cruel, too anti-intellectual, and, just so, that allowed plutocracy to take control over the democratic principle. Slavery was like an enzyme… After Spartacus’ rebellion, just on one via leading to Rome, 6,000 slaves squirmed, crucified, for all to think about. That was Roman style thinking.

An illustration is found in the philosophical triumvirate of Cicero, Caesar and Marcus Antonius. The former two, long opposed, came to appreciate each other, in the last year before Caesar’s assassination. Cicero had tirelessly fought to save the republic. Caesar had expanded it, ruthlessly. Caesar, an intellectual, and immensely talented writer, could appreciate Cicero, another intellectual, and immensely talented writer. Two giants, as gigantic as any Roman would ever be.

However, after the deed, the third one, Caesar’s chief of staff, killed Cicero, and nailed his hands to the Senate. Marcus Antonius viewed intellectuality as adverse. And not enough Romans were intellectual enough to reject Marcus-Antonius’ beastly brutality. Actually the assassins of Caesar did not have a plan, either: they were no intellectuals. This lack of a plan kept on characterizing the empire, tumbling forward for many centuries to come.

The overall anti-intellectual mood of the general Roman population made the rule of brutes, the apology of plutocracy possible, and, even, honorable. Ultimately the victory of the cult of wanting to kill the child to please the boss (Abraham), displaced the reverence for story of the babies fed by the she-wolf. The rage of the plutocrat (“God”) had displaced love for babies vanquishing natural ferocity (as the she-wolf depicts).

During the next six (!) centuries of the Roman empire, countless intellectuals were killed, for the crime of having thought too much.

In striking contrast, for the first millennium of the empire of the Franks (and  successor fragments thereof: Francia, Germania, Italia, Britannia, etc.), no intellectuals were killed, for being intellectuals. One has to wait for the so-called Renaissance for the instructive spectacle of French philosophers being burned alive on top of their books (something that really happened). It’s not that the Franks were sweet to each other, far from it. No polity had so much deadly ferocity between rulers.

The most formidable of Frankish empresses, having reigned, on and off for 50 years, or so, was paraded naked on top of a camel, and tortured to death over three days. Just an example. But the Franks respected intellectuals. The Carolingians had the top philosophers as advisers, friends, or prime ministers (some coming from the British Isles, such as Erigenus and Alcuin).

Thus the Renaissance was the renaissance of… Christian horror, and burning of intellectuals and their books, after a hiatus of 1,000 years. This was a real problem, Paradoxically, this recurrence of deadly superstitious terror led to invent the concept of civilization (a notion now denied again by the uncouth).

The Romans did not have the concept of civilization, and from this absence, they died.  

***

CIVILIZATION: THE PHOENIX BORN FROM THE WARS OF RELIGION:

Socrates said the unexamined life was not worth living. Well, the unexamined history is not worth repeating.

As I have explained, civilization is a process, an augmentation of civility. The word was coined in France, as the country came out of seven religious war in quick succession (each of these wars has a name). The French religious wars were greatly the product of foreign intervention, as Philip II of Spain, went on a rampage to control the world, using Catholic terror as an instrument. However the invention and denomination of the concept of civilization coincided with the Edict of Nantes (1598 CE) for very good reason.

France was sick and tired of religious hatred, that is why the concept of civilization was invented, and gained purchase in the next 4 centuries. A provision of the Edict even insured safety of Protestants from the Inquisition, ABROAD. So doing, French nationality superseded religious appurtenance. “This crucifies me,” protested Pope Clement VIII. Well, good, let me bring more nails.

Let’s notice in passing that the Franks already had the notion that belonging to a civilization was more important than obeying a religion: they viewed themselves not as Christians, Jews, or, for that matter, Muslims, but as “Europeans”. Thus one sees that there was a devolution in the millennium following 600 CE. In 600 CE, pretty much everybody north of the Goths in Iberia, and the Longobardi in Italy, was a Frank (even if a Jewish camel driver of Syrian origin; yes, there were camels in Francia…). However, when Europe was ravaged by religious wars in the period 1100 CE to 1700 CE,  that was forgotten.

***

THEOCRACY AS AN INVENTION OF PLUTOCRACY:

The religious wars started top down: the emperor back in Constantinople asked for help (against the invading Turks), the Pope called for organizing a jihad (OK, 10,000 Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem had been massacred in just one assault…), and the Frankish nobles delivered. Yet the first killed by the crusading mob were German Jews.

Later the genocide against the Cathars was even more top down, as the southern populations, even when Catholic, supported the Cathars. In that case, the Pope, irked by the assassination of his fascist legate, called to the help of the French king and his nobles.

Lesson: devolution happens, and it can be engineered, top down, by the plutocrats who profits from it. The French king captured the giant County of Toulouse, which covered two-thirds of the old Roman province of Gallia Narbonensis. None of this was accidental: the Roman republican tradition was strong in Narbonensis. Catharism (the “katharos”, the “pure”, in other words, puritans), a deeply anti-Catholic, anti-plutocratic ideology was embraced in Languedoc, because people there wanted to go back to the republic. The County of Toulouse was a federal republic in disguise. (And the story did not end here, as the English, thus American parliamentary system originated in Toulouse, through Monfort!)

The Edict of Nantes was submitted to the Parlements the same year, 1598, when Philip II croaked (the Parlement of Rouen signed it only in 1609: thus parlements can block civilization, as Louis XVI would experience, 175 years later, or the 21 C Americans, every day…).

The fascist, fanatical emperor Philip II, in his forties, wrecked by cancer, could not be moved anymore, because of the pain. But emperors are made to be served, so a hole was made in his mattress, allowing him to evacuate waste he had been so keen to produce.

Meanwhile, France evacuated the fanatical spirit Philip II had done so much to foster, and decided to enjoy civilization instead. Henri IV, the “green gallant“, who had never seen a girl he did not like all too much, between two assassination attempts, promised a chicken in every pot, once a week, and ordered his main war marshal to order the economy around, just as he ordered armies before.

The Duc de Sully proceeded with an economic stimulus program of national industrialization, a distant transmogrified descendant of the one decided by Athens’ National assembly in 489 CE, when she equipped herself with a 200 trireme war fleet (ravaging the ecology of Attica in the process). Rome imitated Athens during her wars with Carthage, thereafter enjoying the fruit of military-industrial complex for 7 centuries thereafter. Similarly the Italian republics of the Middle Ages financed their armies with creative financial engineering, mixing lending, plutocracy, and the military in semi harmonious wholes (complete with the occasional default).

However, what was new with Sully and Henri IV, which had never been done before, is that, to go with the brand new concept of civilization, came the concept of deliberately engineering the economy to profit the people, top down. (The New Deal of Roosevelt was a direct imitation of Henri IV, complete with the chicken in every pot…)

It would take two more generations for France to defeat Spain completely, somewhere in Germany, meanwhile creating the independent Netherlands. (Not that the Dutch were grateful; as the typical teenager who turns against the parent, the Netherlands, tried very hard to compete with France, after conquering England!)

Philip II, by the way, was the son of the French born, and highly philosophical Charles V. This demonstrates the ravaging influence of terroristic mental systems: as the son of Charles was exposed to the mood of the Inquisition, he became its most fervent promoter, even launching entire armadas to massacre the French colonies in the Carolinas. (Or why Americans don’t speak French!)

Philip’s father, Charles, obviously had less influence on him than the mood of Catholic terror which gripped Spain (and would subsequently make this most advanced civilization sputter for centuries, all the way into the intervention of the church into the war against the republic which started in 1936).

It’s no accident that plutocratization augments in collaboration with superstition and the disintegration of civilization. As happened when the Greco-Roman empire disintegrated just as a space shuttle with a hole in its heat shield, going way too fast loses pieces here and there, before completely dislocating.

***

RELIGION THERE IS ALWAYS, AND BREAKING IT DOWN, HEALTHY:

The question of the nature of the gods is intimately tied to the question of what is meant by being “intelligent”.

Socrates was tried, in part, for having offended the gods, a capital offense, just as in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other Islamist republic nowadays.

Basically Socrates found the Athenian state, and its gods, stupid, and reciprocally. In the end, the offense-of-the-gods charge was dropped, and Socrates was condemned to death on the more relevant charge of “corrupting the youth.”

Indeed, many of Socrates students, lovers and boyfriends played the most prominent role in the defeat of Athens, and ruled the city-state as dictators, after throwing out democracy.

Denigrating stupid and vicious mental systems is an absolute good. This is how civilization progresses, for the best: by autophagy of obsolete structures.

It turns out that exercise activates autophagy in cells, and thus they get rid of broken organelles and old components, getting younger and more performing. See:  http://abcnews.go.com/Health/WellnessNews/exercise-cells-biologically-young/story?id=9211419 (Initially Italian research confirmed in other places, such as Texas).

The progression of civilization is not just an absolute good, it’s an absolute necessity. Just as the inner components of cells decay in time, so does any socio-economy. As the genus Homo modifies the environment, ravaging what was, the behavior of Homo has to change, and become more subtle in the understanding of nature it encompasses.

An excellent example: the Mayan civilization. The environment changed, in great part because of the impact of Mayan civilization. We know the Mayas ran out of their main construction wood, having destroyed the resource. This made much expensive the upkeep of their civilization. And then there was a long drought (minus 25% or 40%). At this point, we do not know if the drought was induced in part by the Mayas themselves. However, I would dare say that seems likely, and an obvious mechanism would have been deforestation (which we know happen, from the disappearance of the main construction wood).

Some will scoff, and suggest I come down from my big Mayan horse. However it has been suggested that the climate warmed up, at the end of the neolithic through a human induced greenhouse, from too much methane scatologically emanating from the august derrieres of millions of cattle, which would have been otherwise eaten by lions, had Homo Sapiens not been around… 

If that is confirmed, the drought of the Middle Earth emanated from human agents, and then so does the apparition of the hydraulic dictatorships, and then, ultimately the terribly dictatorial and divisive Abrahamist religion, and its various sects. (Reminder: two of the variants of Abrahamism, the Israeli and Iranian one are busy proposing us to join them in a nuclear war, at this point, because they have the same nasty god.)

***

NO GOOD WITHOUT EVIL:

Good cannot take out evil. Saint Francis of Assisi talked nicely to birds, but he could not have talked to Hitler, or, for that matter, to so called “Saint” Louis, and steer them away from evil. Only a better, stronger evil can take out more weaker, more stupid, obsolete evil.

In World War Two, 80 millions crazed out Germans were taught the correct philosophy by heavy bombing of their cities. Kant was no help, just the opposite.

By the way, the question often comes up of whether religion is restricted to those who admire Abraham for accepting to kill a child. But German nationalism, just as Stalinism, were religions too. I would refute, though that Nazism and Stalinism were “secular” religions, because secularism means living in one’s age, and returning to tribalism, as Nazism had it, was several millennia off.

And why was Stalinism not secular, either?

Simply because it denied democracy. Just denying the private possession of capital, and reserving it to the state, is a denial of democracy. (Of course Stalin’s violations of democracy went much further than that, and included the denial of justice and life!)

Tribalism has been long denied, as it should be. The Greco-Roman world, and its associated Celto-German and Goth-Scythian worlds constituted an enormous globalization involving the Mediterranean world and Western Europe.

The Greco-Romano-Celto-German globalization, 21 centuries ago, was first an optimal economic area. Expensive Roman wine was exchanged for slaves 9among other things). As an author laughed then, a Roman could get a servant in Gaul, for a drink!

Excahnges made Northern Europe so rich that it covered itself with what Caesar called “opida”, cities, often fortified mountain tops, where commerce and industry were conducted (some had more than 7 kilometers of ramparts; as they were built in wood, nowadays only the earthworks are left).

Denigrating religions which abuse, and sexually torture children has always been an absolute good. And a long tradition of the West. It was the main moral argument, and, thus, the main military strength, of the Romans versus Carthage. The Romans occupied the moral heights, thus Carthage was defeated.

When Muhammad preached what Allah told him, many of his orders had to do with treating girls better than they had been in the savage Arabian deserts: don’t kill them after birth, and if captured, don’t hesitate to make love to them, instead of treating them only as slaves to be sold. Thus spoke Muhammad. That superior moral position, one of many in Islam, made the Arabs righteous, hence hard to beat (especially as Christianity had made the Romans soft in the head, as Hitler pointed out! Now that I have quoted Hitler favorably, I am going to work harder to find something positive to say about Santorum…).

By denigrating and destroying religions which promoted the killing of children, civilization has progressed, for the best. The Romans used absolute, total war, killing a large part of the Carthaginian and Celtic population to do so. The descendants of the massacred faithful of the Punic and Celtic religion agreed with the Romans, though.

The sexual torture of children by mutilating their sexual parts is itself part of a brutalization of man by man, a preliminary to war. If you want brutal warriors, brutalize them as children. The Incas compressed the brains of their future super fighters, as children, to turn them into robotic brutes.

***

OF THE DIRTY PRIMITIVISM OF SOME ABRAHAMIST SECTS:

Recently it came to light that most French slaughterhouses practiced the ritual killing of animals according to Judaism and its parrot, Islamism. That method consists in cutting the throat of the animal, ear to ear, slicing open both the windpipe and the esophagus. As a dedicated butcher, the god of Abraham, pays attention to spill as much blood as possible, so the animal is alive, as its heart pumps blood out of the enormous opening in its throat.

A problem of course is that the bacteria in the gut of the animal spill with the blood, as the animal, apparently disgusted by the torture ordered by god, tends to throw up (just like Santorum, but to throw up, Santorum needs just to read president Kennedy).  

To avoid the mixing of bacteria with the meat, the European Union has a strict procedure:

1) The animal is stunned, by being hit on the head with a spring loaded hammer.

2) The unconscious animal is hung by the hind legs, and two small incisions are made in the jugular veins and carotids, through which blood drains. Meanwhile, the lower esophagus is exposed and tied up tight by an elastic, preventing the content of the rumen to be vomited out.

3) The still unconscious animal dies, its rumen tied off. The viscera, full of bacteria, are evacuated, still intact in their pouches, after being further tied off. Great attention is paid to not poke through them.

Thus, the Halal (= “lawful“) and Kosher method, by mixing animal vomit with meat, is intrinsically unhygienic.

Another point is that torturing to death conscious animals is against European Union law. However, some religious ritual killings are allowed. All I can say, is that we are lucky that the Aztecs were defeated, and do not have nuclear weapons, as the Jews do. otherwise the ritual killing of terrorists would happen on the great pyramid, according to the sacred religious ritual of tearing their hearts out, and presenting it to the sacrificial victim.

The French Prime Minister, Fillon, pointed out that “we are in a modern country, there are traditions which are ancestral traditions, which do not correspond to much anymore, whereas in the past they corresponded to hygiene problems… One could think about it.” This is a word for word translation faithful to what he said and not the biased transliterations seen in places such as the Jerusalem Post.

Hearing that, the ritualists went ballistic.

France harbors the largest ritualist communities of Jews (600,000) and Muslims (millions). Most people of Jewish and Muslim descent in France, are, of course practicing the national religion of France, secularism (“laïcité“, with arguing replacing praying, many times an hour), arguing  character).

Some will say: let them be, let’s be tolerant…

***

TOLERANCE, BY DEFINITION, HAS LIMITS:

But tolerance is just that, no more. In Latin, it means to endure, to bear… Moreover, flouting one’s weird non secular quirks can definitively backfire, when they are in minority.

There is no doubt that, should the Jews not have practiced circumcision, it would have been much harder for the Nazis to catch them. Flouting one’s superstition for all to see can clearly make one into a target. In the Netherlands the Jews were registered, so more than 95% were exterminated (about 120,000 in absolute numbers). In France, it is against the law to register people according to the sect they may, or not belong to. Conclusion: only a small minority, mostly foreign Jews were killed by the Nazis in France (only 75,000 assassinated out of may be a million, between French Jews and  refugee Jews who the USA had rejected).

And what I am saying has a very practical consequence: Israel would be well advised to not be too arrogant and loudly visible… As an attack against Iran would surely make it. I say this as a friend of democratic Israel (should there be such a thing), and  someone who would surely would remove the Iranian theocracy in a puff of smoke, were I a fairy.

*** 

FLAUNTING ONE’S DIFFERENCE IS NOT INNOCENT, WHEN IT HAS A TRIBAL CHARACTER:

In an apparently completely different note, one learns a lot from details. After a Very High Speed train crash, the minister of transport was photographed on the crash site with a hyper expensive Swiss watch. Then a blogger found that most “People” Republic of China officials had Cartier $6500 or Rolex $13000 watches, and the like. Authorities promptly closed the offending site. Right now one expensive Swiss watch out of two is sold in the PRC.

What’s the connection with sexual mutilations of children? Symbols. People wear ultra expensive watches to flaunt their power, their success, to other plutocrats, or the lower rabble. Doing so makes power, or even plutocracy honorable. That is why nobles in Europe around 1500 CE wore immensely expensive clothing (sometimes worth many millions).

Flaunting riches just does not say: we have it, and you do not, but also: it’s good that some have it all, and the others who have nearly nothing.

Similarly, circumcision and other tribal scars and mutilations say: we belong to such and such elected people, and you don’t. Not nice, and it can backfire. After the Arabs took control of half of the Roman empire, and all of Persia, they requested Jews and Christian to wear marks on their clothing, as befitted lower beings. From discriminating against to being treated as a vermin, there is just more of the same…

Human beings are super chimpanzees. Chimpanzees know very well that they have mostly one enemy, and that is the next group of chimps, over there. They hate them nearly as much as they hate leopards. Man has long known the same, and it’s all over human culture. It’s actually the main message of the Bible. Man has mostly one enemy, and that enemy belongs to the other tribe, whatever the other tribe is. Thus, any tribal signal is potentially offensive.

***

TRADITIONS AS RESERVOIRS OF TRIBAL VIOLENCE:

Collectivities may or may not have civilization (the process of becoming more civil), but they always have traditions, and even libraries of traditions. As tribal aspects dominate traditions, those libraries are not innocent.

Let me give an example. In the 1930s Thousands of Egyptian women could be observed bathing on the beaches with scant clothing. Egypt was then occupied by the fierce British imperialists, imposing the female flesh onto the Believers, who did not believe that much anymore. Fast forward 80 years and now Egyptian TV channels have been colonized by the money of the theocratic plutocrats of Saudi Arabia, who have a vital interest to turn Egypt into an extension of their vast realm. So now one can observe there people who look exactly like bin Laden reading the news. Their Arabic dress has nothing to do with Egyptian tradition, but everything to do with Saudi tradition.

Meanwhile many Egyptian women are covered with tents, and those who do not, tend to get attacked, much more than they used to. Sexism on the march, and Aisha, a strong anti-sexist and partisan of a “secular Caliphate”, both an adversary of Uthman (Third Caliph) and a general fighting step-son Ali (Fourth Caliph) would say: “I told you so!”.

One often hear that all civilizations are equivalent, but not rarely hear that all devolutions are equivalent.

Moods can become traditions. So it’s important to combat those moods camping as traditions. One case was the slave trade, which founded many a fortune in the Americas, and Europe. It’s justly condemned, and assuredly does not have too many partisans… in the Americas and Europe. Yet, one has forgotten an important aspect of it: the European traders who acquired the slaves did not hunt them in Africa. Africans hunted Africans to enslave them.

This is important, because the moods and traditions that made slavery such an important aspect of the African socio-economy have not been explored, as it has been taken for granted that Americans and Europeans were responsible for the enslavement of Africans, and it is Politically Correct to sing song about the lack of civilization of Europe. Whereas the problem was just an aspect of plutocracy, not Eurocracy.

As African traditions were left, unexamined, some of them have festered anew, especially after European imperial control was removed (so called “decolonization”, a funny word, since most African countries did not have European “colons”, in the technical sense of the Latin “coloni”). Recently, though, some people of African descent, genetic or cultural, such as yours truly, have become aware of the problem with the hypocritical whining of all too many black men.

Verily, the cure for hypocrisy is hypercrisy. Instead of criticizing less (“hypo”) than deserved, one criticizes more (“Hyper“) than deserved. That’s what philosophers do.

***

AMERICAN GENOCIDE AS CRIMINAL IMPERIUM, UNEXAMINED

An example of national hypocrisy was the massacre of American natives by the American government after the Secession War. Gold in the Black Hills of dakota had been found, after the california gold rush had exhausted itself. At some point, before the famous battle of Little Big Horn, no less than four American generals heading four American armies converged on innocent Indian populations (one of them being the famously flamboyant general Custer). The goal was to kill them.

An example was the Nez Perce’. They had never killed anybody, but an American army chased men, women and children for weeks in the mountainous wilderness, before cornering them, after a pursuit of 2,000 kilometers, in the Bears Paw Mountains, 40 kilometers away from safety in Canada, and massacring them. Survivors were imprisoned. A New York Times editorial at the time (1877 CE) condemned the aggression: “On our part, the war was in its origin and motive nothing short of a gigantic blunder and a crime.”

The fundamental reason for such massacres was the will from Washington to impose its imperium (To use the appropriate terminology, which is Roman)… But what for? Pure rapine. There was no fig leaf, as when Caesar intervened in Gaul because the Helvetii had decided to migrate en masse to South West Gaul (58 BCE).

***

EXAMINING DETAILED MOTIVATIONS FOR ABOMINATION:

Americans have failed to examine carefully the connection between rapine and Imperium in the USA. Let me explain with a further comparison.  The devil is in the details. The abomination is in the motivation.

Napoleon was a grotesque dictator, who, like his nephew later, stole the republic to satisfy his ridiculous ambition, of the sort one associates with a toddler who wants if all, whatever it is. His attempt to re-enslave Haiti was deeply against the spirit of 1789, and inhumanly retrograde.

However, Napoleon’s career started following the blossoming of his military genius after an aggression of various plutocrats, Prussian, English and Austrian against the French republic.

So French Imperium in the revolutionary wars started as a defense mechanism. When that defense became imperial in nature, the true Jesus of our civilization, Sade warned against it. Sade was right, but it is understandable when a defense turns into an offense.

What is troubling in the American case is that naked aggression of the genocidal type was committed in the name of the exploitation principle. And, because it has not been harshly criticized at the institutional level, that mood has been left unscathed. It was fully in evidence in the aggressions against Afghanistan (1979 and earlier, covertly), or Iraq (1990s and after 2003).

Imperium meant absolute command and control, all the way to the death penalty, police, judge and executioner in one, the consular way, the modern application of which has been defended by the French republic (remember the French ultimatum to Hitler, September1, 1939). The imprium is now the doctrine of the government of the USA, as Attorney General Holder just explained.

The Romans distinguished Romanitas and Imperium; the technical deliquescence of the empire occurred when, greatly due to the hypocritical Christian terror, the Imperium was outsourced to Goths and Germans.

Ultimately, the civilization of the West survived because the Franks grabbed the Imperium principle, and applied it to the Goths, the Alemanni, the Angli and Saxons, the Pope and his fanatics, the Longobardi, the Muslims, the Avars, the Vikings, etc.

There is little doubt that (co-)emperor Commodus dropped the imperium ball when he succeeded his father Marcus Aurelius.

OK, fast forward to the Afghan war, started by the USA officially on July 3, 1979… The reason why Europeans such as the French are skeptical about the Afghan war has to do with the fact that they drew more careful and thorough notions about past wars.

Imperium is crucial, but it has to be applied well. It was criminal against the Nez Perce’, and it is criminal in Afghanistan, but it was appropriate in Libya, or Ivory Coast. It was also entirely appropriate to chase the Ottoman empire out of most of the Middle East and North Africa, from Iraq to Arabia, all the way to Algeria. Why?

***

NO EMPIRE, NO CIVILIZATION:

Empires are serious things. The Alemanni had invaded the hard-to-defend gap in the Roman Limes between the Rhine and the Danube. They suffered several defeats at the hands of Roman emperors, the last by Gratianus (which gave the name Gratianopolis, hence the modern city of “Grenoble“). A century later, imperator Clovis conquered the Alemanni in 496 CE.

In 746, the Caroligian king Carloman  (de facto co-emperor of the Occidental Roman empire) ended an uprising by summarily executing all Alemannic nobility at the blood court at Cannstatt. He was using the same imperator characteristic of Roman consuls, French presidents, and now Obama…The Alemanni, “Alles Men”, in French: Allemands, never tried that trick again for 1,000 years! In the following century, Alamannia was ruled by Frankish dukes, before being solidly melded in the tripartite arrangement of  the treaty of Verdun (843 CE).

That does not mean that it is sufficient to establish an empire to establish a civilization, as the Mongols demonstrated more than once (on the third attempt, Ginghis Khan did introduce elements of more advanced civilization, such as free trade of goods, men and ideas, and superstitious freedom, Mongol-Nestorian inspired; on the fourth try, the Mongols used their version of Islam: they had discovered that empire worked best, if connected to a civilization, not just an army).

The Ottoman empire blocked not just printing, but civilization itself, although blocking printing was a big part of blocking civilization.

Revealingly, the “Thousand And One Night” were published  in Paris first, and so was a lot of what has become the “Orientalist” cultural framework. Paradoxically, France defended better some of the old traditions of middle earth as a cultural heritage (after all, that is what Rome was expert at doing: not very strong intellectually on their own, the Romans, like the Arabs later, gleaned what they could.)

Brutalizing rituals, such as sexual mutilations of male and female children and the subjugation of women, can, and ought, to be the object of secular jihad. Freeing the women, that’s also freeing the children they educate, and the men some of them will grow into.

It turns out that by the age of six months, babies understand a tremendous amount of language. Unborn babies even learn to distinguish languages.  Thus the argument of desert dweller that women ought to educate children until age seven, and then men take over their sons’ upbringing, is conducive to devolution. Obviously dumb mothers will educate children to be stupid too. Uneducated, sequestered, enfeebled women cannot be as brainy as if they were fully endowed with all capabilities, as both logic and experiences on rats demonstrate.

Making women into morons was clearly antinomic to Muhammad’s life and opinions. However it was imposed by Uthman and his ilk. Maybe instead of Mohammedans , one should talk about Uthmanists?

There is no civilization without a careful examination of the situation. it’s not just, as Socrates said, that the unexamined life is not worth living. It is that the unexamined life calls for extermination.

One of the better example of that is the manipulation of minds that the fossil fuel plutocracy has engineered in the USA, thanks to exerting enormous money, that is power, to bend the spirits in the way the wanted.

The result, of course, is a gigantic amount of “fracking“. anybody who studied a bit the Roman empire would know that this is a mistake. OK, the Romans did not burn fossil fuels for energy, but they made equivalent mistakes… Mistakes that the Europeans (or, as the Muslims, said, the Franks) exerted deadly force not to make during the Middle Ages’ ecological crisis.

The Europeans compared what they had before to what they had now, and compared that to what they ought to have, and what they could do, and what it would bring. The most basic industry, the one that made warmth, cooking and construction possible, was blocked where it was necessary to spare nature the ravages of man. Civilization was saved. It is all the more remarkable since very bad wars soon occurred, plus the Black Plague, and a massive depopulation (the sort of combination of factors that many feel brought down the Greco-Romans).

Yet, the European Middle Age civilization did not miss a beat, and ket on civilizing itself at an accelerated pace. Why? Because the principles of comparing and civilizing were in command of European culture (the Inquisition tried its migthiest to stop that, but those efforts were crushed by the armed forces of the English and French sovereigns, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and the French Henris being most prominent that way).

Compare, then civilize. The modern variant of the oldest definition of the genus Homo: I compare, therefore I think.

***

Patrice Ayme

Faith Crazed Raptors

FANATIC FASCISTS COME FROM THE TEMPLE:

Abstract: I will argue in an essay to come that faith and beliefs are fundamental to the genus Homo. They are something lesser animals neither posses, nor need.

However when murderous superstition is made the fundament of society (as in the Late Roman empire, Islam, or the Aztecs), this is savagery. Theocratic savagery is a cover for plutocracy unchained. That lethal disease is the surest way to kill a civilization.

For example, when the Mayas got struck by a prolonged, but mild drought, they did not get their religious priorities straight, and they killed each other, instead of sorting out the difference between their way of life, and ecological change. (Yes, it was not just “climate change”.)

When the Vice Leader of the USA covers himself with ashes, making a show of his superstitiously wrecked mind, supposedly to edify us, suspect the worst outcome.

Here below are a few historical examples of hijacking of the mental equipment of faith and belief by theocracy, plutocracy, and people who want to attack other .

People who want to invade other countries, such as Vice Biden, who, after all, attacked Afghans… for no good apparent reason, except the fact that, as he himself admits, is a self proclaimed abhorrent person.

I review the gathering primitivism of American politicians. Worse is Biden, who is trying to establish Catholicism as a religion, or the fanaticism of Christianity as an inspiration, using his official function to do so.

Then I explain why fanaticism came from the Temple, and the measures republican Rome took against that.

These measures were grossly violated by the Late Roman Catholic empire. (Is that what Biden wants to return to?) Islam imitated the whole Catholic disaster, just made it bigger (no separation of politics and religion, and law in Islam, differently from even Justinian’s Roman empire).

This brings us to Syria: no armed intervention there, as long as the West does not get secular guarantees, I say.

As I have argued in “Islam Against Civilization”, unreconstructed Islam is fundamentally an enemy of civilization (so my position on attacking the Syrian army is different from the one I had in Libya, where the situation was mostly secularist professionals and oppressed tribes versus a crazed gang of plutocrats; meanwhile in Egypt the Islamists, propped by the fortune of Saudis,  have been promoting their equation of their fanaticism with Egyptian citizenship).

But, should a united opposition around a secular program come to the fore, a bombing campaign as in Libya would be a good thing, if Assad keeps on massacring civilians, in his monstrous way.

This being said, as long as the USA, the leading nation, educates by promoting the return to superstitious savagery, it is difficult to teach Syrians or Iranians the secular state… The one endowed with the religious tolerance Rome at her imperial apogee was blessed with, 2,000 years ago.

***

RELIGIOUS FANATICISM: POLITICALLY CORRECT DECAY OF THE USA:

Markers and enforcers of civilization are going down in the USA, big time. A U. S. Supreme Court decree overruled plenty of laws, with “Citizen United“. The Supreme Court decided that money was free speech.

In other words: the USA is officially a plutocracy (Nancy Pelosi agreed, and she used the word “plutocracy“; I am not alone in using this concept anymore; I will argue here that plutocracy, fanaticism and fascism are words which go very well together).

When he was campaigning for president in 1960, John Kennedy called for the absolute separation of church and state. Rick Santorum, a young prominent presidential candidate in the USA, an ex Senator, lobbyist, and enormously financed by plutocrats, said in February 2012, that separation of church and state, and Kennedy’s discourse about it, made him want to vomit:

“To say that people of faith have no role in the public square? You bet that makes you throw up… What kind of country do we live in that says only people of non-faith can come into the public square and make their case?”

We don’t bet, Mr. Santorum, we think. You bet, because you are a money man.

The Economist intones that: …”the notion that any American politician could banish all but the faithless from the public square has become laughable. If anything, piety has become a prerequisite in politics. Thomas Jefferson may have been relaxed about such matters, but no modern candidate for the presidency would dare to profess no faith, or to question the existence of the Almighty. Barack Obama is a churchgoer. George Bush named Christ his favourite philosopher and started cabinet meetings with a prayer. Jimmy Carter prayed up to 25 times a day… Kennedy did call for the separation of church and state. So did Ronald Reagan—and, for that matter, John Locke a few centuries earlier.”

What Kennedy said was this: “I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials; and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

Article Six of the Constitution states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

The First Amendment of the constitution of the USA states that:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion … or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

By “Congress” is meant the House of Representatives, plus the Senate. The Vice President presides over the Senate.

So what did Vice President Biden do? He promoted an establishment of religion. On his forehead, for all to see. He is, not just a fanatic, but a loud one.

***

ASH-AMED VICE-PRESIDENT:

Biden showed up with that large, dirty ugly smudge on his forehead. Is it because he does not wash? Yes, but that’s not the point.

Biden has a dirty forehead because he “abhors” himself. And he wants everybody to know. As simple as that. 

Biden was promoting an old tradition tied to his sect, Roman Catholicism. Said sect was inspired by the mythical Jesus (a prophet whose execution was not recorded by the Roman authorities, whereas several  others at the time were, throwing a cloud of suspicion over the whole thing as a montage by Roman authorities, much later).

Jesus insisted that he came to enforce “the law“, the superstitious ensemble of orders found in the Bible, a book written by some Jews in Babylon. Part of “the law” is that man is abhorrent. Presumably only god, and, in particular. His representative on earth (the emperor or caliph), is not abhorrent.

So what did these Jews write, 25 centuries ago, that impresses the unconstitutional Biden so much to this day? Multiple quotes are made in the Bible (just as in the Qur’an, 11 centuries later) to inflict contempt on those who do not follow orders. The following quote is typical:

Job 42:3–6. Job says to God: “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. The other eye wandereth of its own accord. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.“

The superstitious Biden, and his ilk, celebrate, and symbolically  re-enact this on “Ash Wednesday”, by covering themselves with ash.

Founding fathers, and first two presidents, Washington and Adams, had clearly signed a document, as presidents, specifying that “the USA is not a Christian nation“. But people such as Biden cling to superstition: it beats historical accuracy any day.

***

IS THE BIBLE THE WORK OF THE DEVIL?

The story of Job is fascinating: it starts when Allah (so called “God”) asks Satan for his advice about Job. God/Allah wonders if Job is as much of a believer as he appears to be. God is lost, Godd reaches to his friend for advice. So we see that the Bible tells us, not just that God is not omniscient. The Bible tells us that the god of Jews, Christians and Muslims is a clueless gossip who consults with…Satan.

This is an interrogation all sadists have, when facing their debased victims: how to make sure that their submission comes from the heart, and is thorough? How can the sadistic god make sure that he totally dominates his victim, Job?

To make sure, Satan suggests a course of action, making Job suffer in all possible ways, and see if he curses God. God (Allah) follows Satan’s advice. Satan advises to victimize and trash Job in all possible ways, and see if the tortured unfortunate still lauds God. In other words, God (Allah) does not just conspire with Satan, but appears to behave, on occasion, as Satan’s creature.

The same problem is repeated in the Qur’an: Allah conspire with Satan (and not just as he did in the Bible, but in new and different ways). In the Qur’an Allah Himself points out the difficulty, of witnessing the collaboration of Satan and Allah, before ominously declaring that whatever Allah does with the Prince of Darkness is none of the business of Believers. (As you can see, I have read the Qur’an well… and much better than the Bible, because it is much shorter! True, it’s just a 400 pages addendum…)  

This official congress between God and Satan explains why the Cathars came to think what they did, namely that Satan controlled the part of the universe in which Christians dwelled, and no wonder that the Catholic chiefs burned them all alive, including women and children.

As the Cathars no doubt remarked at the time, the pope and his agents were thus demonstrating, if need be,  that they were agents of Satan, just like the sadistic, murderous, torturing god they celebrate. The god Biden celebrates as Vice President, and head of the Senate, when he covers his ashamed self with ash. The god of relentless, torturous debasement.

Let’s observe in passing that there are 2.1 million Alawites in Syria (see below), but that there were perhaps 5 million Cathars, and that they were living in symbiosis with the even larger population of the south, all the way to the Balkans. Yet, nobody knows the Cathars now. Cathars were killed to the last, by the pope and his henchmen, the plutocrats in and around Paris.

***

WHAT IS SO ABHORRENT ABOUT BIDEN?

The “Catholic” president, Kennedy, was looking forward to secularism.

Secularism, that’s living in one’s own age. But Biden’s message is different. He looks forward living as people did seven centuries ago, in the age of Catholic terror in the West. With ashes on one’s forehead come the will to burn even more abhorrent people alive.

Burning miscreants is all over the Bible, it is another tradition: if you believe in ashes on your head, the next step is to turn people you are bound to like less than yourself, into ashes.

However, it is good to know that great leaders admit to be such scums, that they abhor themselves.

The immediate question is whether someone who “abhors himself” ought to be considered fit for the presidency of the world’s mightiest country. What’s next? Presidents who go around, advertizing that they are so abhorent to themselves that they ought to kill themselves?

If Biden abhors himself, that he covers himself with mud, should we abhor him too? Does Biden vote for somebody he abhors? If he cannot, should not vote for his abohrrent self, why should we vote for him?

***

WHY THE WISE IS NO FAN OF THE FANUM:

Against fanaticism, common decency itself, struggles in vain. Why so? Fanaticism, comes from the Latin, fanum, the temple. The Romans had already noticed that those coming out of there were not full human beings, but enraged, well, fanatics.

This is literally true: around 400 CE, ignorant monks, “men in black“, ravaged literature and thinkers, especially in the Oriental Part of the empire; this wanton destruction played no small role in the ultimate success of Islam, as most populations, from North Africa to Syria were deeply resentful of the tyranny of Constantinople’s theocracy. Thus they did not try to resist the Arabs too much in the initial invasion; for example Egypt revolted when it discovered that caliph Omar was even worse than the emperor in Constantinople. By then, it was too late!  

Why is the temple so conducive to, well, fanaticism?

Think about it: the temple is built, encouraged or tolerated by the state. It is part of the state, more or less, one way or another. The temple, as the Romans saw it, taught unbelievable things about the gods. However those who came out of there believed those things as if they were real. Things that those who manned the state, the powerful, wanted them to believe.

So the Roman republic made its religion not too serious a thing, and under the control of the People (the exact opposite of the Christian and Muslim theocracies, 7 to 10 centuries later, which were intimately tied to the state, especially Islam. Whereas in the Roman empire, law kept an independent existence).

Before soon all rites and religions were authorized in republican Rome, as long as they did not compromise public peace, or did not involve uncivilized behavior, such as human sacrifices (as the Celtic and Carthaginian religions did).

Moreover, the chief priest of the Roman republic’s religion (the Pontifex Maximus) was elected. Please inform the Ayatollahs in Iran of this.

***

TOO MUCH FANATICISM: THE SAD STORY OF THE JEWS:

Thus the state had interests that those unbelievable things would be believed. OK, sometimes the state is not really a state, it’s a pseudo state, a simulated state.

The arch example here comes from Judaism. The Jews (or people, or entire nations, such as around the sea of Azov, who had decided they were Jews) conspired very well among themselves, and with others, for millennia, using their religion as a pseudo state or conspiracy. Hence the importance for them of strange rituals such as sexual mutilation, to identify each other as a group, and a common sacrifice.

Jews often conspired with reigning plutocrats, in the generalized sense. Thus “anti-Semitic” eruptions often coincide with otherwise legitimate revolts. An example of this is when surprised Nazis found a thousands of Jews already massacred when they swept east in 1941: the Jews had collaborated with the occupying Russians, and were left behind to explain themselves with the natives.

In any case, the temple is the nexus of the state, and of the unbelievable stories the temple teaches. This incredible stories put minds to sleep, just as bed time stories do, with little children. And it’s not all innocent: the outrageous concept of “promised land” by “god” no less, caused untold misery. It also allowed Bible clutching Europeans to exterminate North Americans and enslave Africans.

The Jews are proud of their promised land notion. However, a huge proportion of the Roman empire was Jewish, and that means a huge proportion of the world was. then there was the absurd Judaica war. Josephus (its only reasonable Jewish rebel general), and others evaluate the number of death above one million. And there were more revolts. Ultimately the war of Jews against Jews and Romans resulted in Christians becoming just the same, and killing Jews, as Christ had more or less recommended.  

Nowadays there are not so many (“pure”) Jews. In absolute numbers less than under imperial Rome. But the European population (in the general sense, counting the Americas), plus the population descending of the ex-Roman empire (so called “Arabs”) is now well above 30 times Rome. In other words, Jews have become insignificant (all the more since many of these so called Jews happen to be blonde and the like, because their ancestors converted to Judaism under the Franks.

***

COMPARE THE FANATICISM OF THE JEWS WITH the Gallo-Roman integration:

All this because Jews went ballistic with their “promised land” fable. One can compare to the Gauls, who, had the same time got occupied by Caesar, at the end of a serious Gallo-Roman  war which lasted more than four centuries (both sides were imperialistic and viewed themselves as domineering, and they were). The Gauls occupied the city of Rome herself in 399 BCE. Yet, after Caesar had definitively defeated the Belgae, and crossed the Rhine into Germania, the Gauls never rebelled against their conquerors. Instead they gave up on their extremely plutocratic, primitive religion (only the elite could be admitted to reading, etc.), and worked at conquering the conquerors from inside (which was achieved thoroughly with the help of the Franks, five centuries later).

The astute will notice that about half of the Jewish population is now clustered to fulfill the promise on a small piece of land, clutching hundreds of nuclear weapons, while threatening Iran, the main surviving piece of an empire which often extended from Syria to India.

The Auschwitz death camp and its 100 (or so) satellite camps covered a region nearly as large as the habitated extent of present day Israel. This is not a reasoning: just an uncanny rapprochement. If wisdom did not come yesterday, will it come tomorrow?

OK, that’s my way of celebrating Netanyahu coming to Washington, to plot the war with Iran.

***

FAITH’S VERY PRACTICAL CONSEQUENCES IN AFGHANISTAN:

In a few weeks, Afghan soldiers treacherously assassinated or wounded dozens of their NATO allies (in just one such attack, more than 20 unarmed, unarmored French soldiers training Afghan soldiers in a gym were chopped down by machine gun fire; Afghan president Karzai was summoned in Paris, but the attacks went on; in just one week the coalition suffered no deadly attack from the Taliban, but three separate attacks of Afghan soldiers killed six American troops, supposedly their brothers in arms).

By the way, let me say in passing that this illustrates the huge mistake arrogant Americans (think Bush and his advisers) by establishing an “ISLAMIST” republic in Afghanistan, and then proclaiming it an ally.

The essence of Western civilization, as imposed by imperator and consul Clovis and “his” Franks, has been the SECULAR republic (Frankish kings were elected, supposedly). Secular does not mean just that one does not believe in stories only toddlers ought to seriously believe.

Secular mainly means that one lives in one’s age. As determined by the science and technology at hand. (By the way, everything indicates that Muhammad would have agreed: one can see his highly secular personality through the lying representation caliph Uthman’s Qur’an made; yes, it’s possible to be both secular and superstitious.)

Afghan soldiers kill Europeans and Americans because those are “unbelievers”. This is directly traceable to the fact that Afghanistan is an ISLAMIST republic. The Qur’an is the Constitution of Afghanistan. So one would expect Afghan soldiers to enforce the Constitution, namely their interpretation of the Qur’an. The Qur’an is the word of Abraham’s god, as allegedly related in the desert to an epileptic analphabet who had married into wealth.

The Qur’an is not too clear about what to do with “unbelievers”. At some point it claims there should be no coercion in religion, but then il also orders that “unbelievers” should be ambushed, killed, at every turn, etc. And certainly “Pagans” are to be killed. And also Muslims who denounce, or renounce, Islam. Killed. (Or maybe the Qur’an did not say the latter for sure, but certainly commenters of the Qur’an, and those who related the life of Muhammad, certainly said this, and all this is viewed as sacred by the majority Sunni Muslims.)

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ATTACK SYRIA? ONLY AFTER SERIOUS SECULAR GUARANTEES:

I was the earliest serious advocate of a military intervention in Libya. Bernard Henri-Levy (BHL) followed, more than three months later, and very efficiently. He was able to persuade French president Sarkozy and his advisers to do something, and they did: French war planes unilaterally intervened first, crushing the attack on Benghazi of Qaddafi’s tank army (thanks to the active stealth fighter-bomber Rafales, the word’s best fighter plane). The French also finished the war, when a few Rafales pulverized Qaddafi 200 vehicles strong escape convoy.  

Now BHL wants to attack in Syria. No doubt, twenty French state of the art jets based in Cyprus with Turkey’s benediction (ha ha ha) could stop dead in their tracks all Assad’s tanks in a city such as Homs.

However, if it’s to help the party of “god is great!“, it is out of the question. Horrible applications of (what are for some) Islam sacred texts orders to kill unbelievers, pagan, and whoever is hated. Thus some rebels in Syria have apparently killed civilians for religious reasons. God is not great is not the correct faith. God is bad id the correct faith. This situation did not happen in Libya (because there everybody is Sunni, although

Many Sunni scholars view the Alawites in Syria as Pagans. This means that, should they lose power there, the Alawites are fair game, as far as the Sunnis who carefully read the Qur’an are concerned. This murderous circus has been going on since 656 CE (at least). “Alawi”, is a French word, but the sect comes directly from Ali, cousin, son in law, companion of arms of the Prophet, even once masquerading in a bed as Muhammad himself (don’t ask, it was life and death!)

The real revolution the Middle East needs would consist into getting rid of the god of the Bible who pursues his reign of terror there. If one comes to think of it, it is a paradox that Muslims are claiming to know the god of the Jews better than the Jews themselves. Out-Jewing the Jews, really? Fanatical Islam has been an excellent cover-up, hiding that the West was never religiously Christian in the sense that (traditional) Islam give to religion.

The perception that traditional Islam is something one ought to improve on is why there was more than 100 variants of Islam, many of them not recognized as Muslim by the Sunnis! There are actually branches of Islam where women (used to) go bare-chested!

The present rise of religious fanaticism has been seen before. After all that it was what happened to the Roman empire around 300 CE. The emperor instituted a sun cult (“Sol Invictis“) with him as representative of god. Within two decades, the immensely brutal youth Constantine, son of an Augustus, and Caesar himself at a very young age, had realized that it was better to use the military like apparatus of the Christian church.

The Christian church came, complete with a fascist, imperial god who consults with Satan, as we saw above. Christianism also persuades the commons that they are “abhorrent”. And then the commons cover themselves with ashes, allowing the emperor all the more superbly.

As far as Constantine was concerned, the fanatical fascism of Christianism was perfect. As the self declared “13th apostle“, and a saint in the (Catholic-)Orthodox religion, he was free to impose his god on all. Starting with his nephew that he killed, his wife whom he steamed to death, and his son the Caesar Crispus, he was obviously jealous of (Constantine owed his status of Augustus from victories of Crispus!), and executed, thanks to judges as helpful to plutocracy as the Supreme Court of the USA reveals itself to be.

Superstitious savagery is the proximal reason why the Roman civilization went down. Confronted with the difficulty of the struggle between Senate based tax evading plutocracy and the military based plutocracy, the outcome was not a return to the republic, but a fall into savage superstitious theocracy. That, in turn, led to a blossoming of further stupidity, ignorance and anti-intellectualism. besides the destruction of philosophers, books, schools, and libraries.

Remember this, next time you look at images from Syria. And next time the ash covered Biden proposes to attack some Muslim country in his own special way.

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Patrice Ayme